/lit/ - Literature

He's exactly rated as he should be

"he" was a gay *black woman mtf and don't you forget it.


*transitioned from white

>>12888377
According to someone on Reddit: Yes. Too flowery language.

No.

>>12888377
definitely

Her father loved me; oft invited me;
Still question'd me the story of my life,
From year to year, the battles, sieges, fortunes,
That I have passed.
I ran it through, even from my boyish days,
To the very moment that he bade me tell it;
Wherein I spake of most disastrous chances,
Of moving accidents by flood and field
Of hair-breadth scapes i' the imminent deadly breach,
Of being taken by the insolent foe
And sold to slavery, of my redemption thence
And portance in my travels' history:
Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle,
Rough quarries, rocks and hills whose heads touch heaven
It was my hint to speak,--such was the process;
And of the Cannibals that each other eat,
The Anthropophagi and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders. This to hear
Would Desdemona seriously incline:
But still the house-affairs would draw her thence:
Which ever as she could with haste dispatch,
She'ld come again, and with a greedy ear
Devour up my discourse: which I observing,
Took once a pliant hour, and found good means
To draw from her a prayer of earnest heart
That I would all my pilgrimage dilate,
Whereof by parcels she had something heard,
But not intentively: I did consent,
And often did beguile her of her tears,
When I did speak of some distressful stroke
That my youth suffer'd. My story being done,
She gave me for my pains a world of sighs:
She swore, in faith, ‘twas strange, 'twas passing strange,
'Twas pitiful, 'twas wondrous pitiful:
She wish'd she had not heard it, yet she wish'd
That heaven had made her such a man: she thank'd me,
And bade me, if I had a friend that loved her,
I should but teach him how to tell my story.
And that would woo her. Upon this hint I spake:
She loved me for the dangers I had pass'd,
And I loved her that she did pity them.
This only is the witchcraft I have used:
Here comes the lady; let her witness it.

>>12888377

I know you all, and will awhile uphold
The unyoked humour of your idleness:
Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That, when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted, he may be more wonder'd at,
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapours that did seem to strangle him.
If all the year were playing holidays,
To sport would be as tedious as to work;
But when they seldom come, they wish'd for come,
And nothing pleaseth but rare accidents.
So, when this loose behavior I throw off
And pay the debt I never promised,
By how much better than my word I am,
By so much shall I falsify men's hopes;
And like bright metal on a sullen ground,
My reformation, glittering o'er my fault,
Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes
Than that which hath no foil to set it off.
I'll so offend, to make offence a skill;
Redeeming time when men think least I will.

>>12888448
love this. speaks to anyone who has had a group or two of unambitious, base, mean-spirited or lethargic friends but then has grown up, achieved excellence, pursued an honorable career, moved up in social position, developed significantly.

>>12888377
Yes

O, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you.
She is the fairies' midwife, and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate-stone
On the fore-finger of an alderman,
Drawn with a team of little atomies
Athwart men's noses as they lie asleep;
Her wagon-spokes made of long spinners' legs,
The cover of the wings of grasshoppers,
The traces of the smallest spider's web,
The collars of the moonshine's watery beams,
Her whip of cricket's bone, the lash of film,
Her wagoner a small grey-coated gnat,
Not so big as a round little worm
Prick'd from the lazy finger of a maid;
Her chariot is an empty hazel-nut
Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub,
Time out o' mind the fairies' coachmakers.
And in this state she gallops night by night
Through lovers' brains, and then they dream of love;
O'er courtiers' knees, that dream on court'sies straight,
O'er lawyers' fingers, who straight dream on fees,
O'er ladies ' lips, who straight on kisses dream,
Which oft the angry Mab with blisters plagues,
Because their breaths with sweetmeats tainted are:
Sometime she gallops o'er a courtier's nose,
And then dreams he of smelling out a suit;
And sometime comes she with a tithe-pig's tail
Tickling a parson's nose as a' lies asleep,
Then dreams, he of another benefice:
Sometime she driveth o'er a soldier's neck,
And then dreams he of cutting foreign throats,
Of breaches, ambuscadoes, Spanish blades,
Of healths five-fathom deep; and then anon
Drums in his ear, at which he starts and wakes,
And being thus frighted swears a prayer or two
And sleeps again. This is that very Mab
That plats the manes of horses in the night,
And bakes the elflocks in foul sluttish hairs,
Which once untangled, much misfortune bodes:
This is the hag, when maids lie on their backs,
That presses them and learns them first to bear,
Making them women of good carriage.

I have been studying how I may compare
This prison where I live unto the world:
And for because the world is populous
And here is not a creature but myself,
I cannot do it; yet I'll hammer it out.
My brain I'll prove the female to my soul,
My soul the father; and these two beget
A generation of still-breeding thoughts,
And these same thoughts people this little world,
In humours like the people of this world,
For no thought is contented. The better sort,
As thoughts of things divine, are intermix'd
With scruples and do set the word itself
Against the word:
As thus, 'Come, little ones,' and then again,
'It is as hard to come as for a camel
To thread the postern of a small needle's eye.'
Thoughts tending to ambition, they do plot
Unlikely wonders; how these vain weak nails
May tear a passage through the flinty ribs
Of this hard world, my ragged prison walls,
And, for they cannot, die in their own pride.
Thoughts tending to content flatter themselves
That they are not the first of fortune's slaves,
Nor shall not be the last; like silly beggars
Who sitting in the stocks refuge their shame,
That many have and others must sit there;
And in this thought they find a kind of ease,
Bearing their own misfortunes on the back
Of such as have before endured the like.
Thus play I in one person many people,
And none contented: sometimes am I king;
Then treasons make me wish myself a beggar,
And so I am: then crushing penury
Persuades me I was better when a king;
Then am I king'd again: and by and by
Think that I am unking'd by Bolingbroke,
And straight am nothing: but whate'er I be,
Nor I nor any man that but man is
With nothing shall be pleased, till he be eased
With being nothing.

The portraiture of the tragedian is always an expression of a desirous flux that inevitably sweeps across the society. Written after, and possibly in reaction to, Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice is such a portrait. It is an interrogation of usury: its individual and social consequents; its political, religious and philosophical arguments.

Aristotle condemned usury; for money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest, and this birth of money from money, whereby the offspring is identical to the parent, is thus the most unnatural mode of money-making.1 Saint Thomas Aquinas denounces money-lending as a sin of injustice; for the use and ownership of the thing must not be reckoned apart from the thing itself.2 Yet Aquinas does recognise the lawful argument to exact compensation for a loan, where the value of that compensation cannot be measured by money – benevolence, love for the lender, and so on.3

Il Sommo Poeta, Dante Alighieri, places sodomites and usuers in the same seventh circle of hell in his Divina Commedia. For both the sodomite and usurer commit unnatural and sterile actions, and are thus condemned to an endless sand and scorched by a rain of flames; barren actions have bred barren punishment.4

The beginning of the twelfth century brought a resurgence of trade with Constantinople and the Orient to the Italian cities upon the Adriatic Sea, especially Venice. This growth of wealth revived banking in these cities, and the financial patterns of the classical world quickly recurred. At first, bankers respected the juridical principles of the Romans and conducted lawful trade; they wholly avoided the illicit use of demand deposits. Only time deposits – loaned money from the banker’s perspective – was used or lent by bankers.5

Nevertheless, bankers gradually succumbed to the temptation of abusing demand deposits. The banks degenerated into the resumption of fractional reserves. The authorities were unable and unwilling to enforce the legal principles; for they derived personal and governmental benefits by their encouragement and privileging of improper banking.

The marbleous splendour of Shakespeare’s Venice is founded upon such usury. The Merchant of Venice is thus an inquiry into the economic interactions of Antonio, the titular merchant; Shylock, the usurer; and Portia, the landlord. For the shift from feudalism to mercantilism was simultaneously a movement from a ritual to a market system of social organisation. Shakespeare’s Venetian portrait is midway through this shift; its characters in various stages of apprehension as these witness the unfettering of individuals from the constraints of ritual.

>>12888669
The Christian Antonio is melancholic and thus marked with malignancy – his melancholy is analogous to the Sophoclean plague, the symbol of imitation and reciprocal violence. The Bard provides Antonio’s double with the Jewish Shylock. Here the Judaism itself is perceived as a malignancy by the Venetian community; for it marks him in contradiction to the Catholic majority.

Just as Shylock is Antonio’s scapegoat for usury and the Jewish responsibility of Christ’s murder, Antonio is Shylock’s scapegoat for Christian hatred. Yet each gravitates to the conflict; for in mercantilism, the mediating element of the conflict, the hindering rival is equally a model for imitation. Antonio has oft delivered from his forfeitures many that have made moan to me;6 Shylock legalises his potential reciprocation with notary and bond, and Antonio’s own assent.

Nevertheless, a critical difference separates Antonio from Shylock, and prevents their total symmetry: their religious beliefs. For neither Catholicism nor Judaism is a conditional aspect of their identities, but the element of distinction from their rival. Shylock poses this struggle with differentiation in his speech:

Hath not
a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions,
senses, affections, passions? Fed with the
same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to
the same diseases, healed by the same means,
warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer
as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not
bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you
poison us, do we not die?7

>>12888675
And, being Jewish, Shylock is unable to differentiate himself from Antonio; to separate Christian from Jew.

According to the traditional Christian position, the Jews are blind because the Messiah came and they failed to recognise his coming. Per the Cum Supremae of Pope Pius XI: on the Abolition of the Amici Israel, announced that the Catholic Church has always been accustomed to pray for the Jewish people, who were the bearers of Divine Revelation up to the time of Jesus Christ: this despite, on account of their subsequent blindness.8

The Jewish position, derived from their rejection of Christ and despite the flourishing of Christianity, renders Christians as credulous and self-deluded. The Jew of Malta begins with Barabas surrounded by gold and boastful of Jewish superiority over Christianity for the riches which the Jew accrues, per Marlowe:

Thus trolls our fortune in by land and sea,
And thus are we on every side enrich’d:
These are the blessings promis’d to the Jews,
And herein was old Abraham’s happiness:
What more may heaven do for earthly man
Than thus to pour out plenty in their laps,
Ripping the bowels of the earth for them,
Making the seas their servants, and the winds
To drive their substance with successful blasts?
Who hateth me but for my happiness?
Or who is honour’d now but for this wealth?
Rather had I, a Jew, be hated thus,
Than pitied in Christian poverty9

Marlowe’s Barabas sees no fruit in the Christian faith and decries the Christian for his life of beggary. The Jew, having scambled up more wealth by far than those brag of faith,10 proves, solipsistically, the falsity of Christianity. Thus blinded by his rejection of Christ, Shylock continues with the logical consequences of the total symmetry of imitative rivalry which he alone perceives:

And if you wrong us, shall
we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will
resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian,
what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong
a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian
example? Why, revenge! The villainy you teach me I
will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the
instruction.11

Bassanio has a malignancy of his own: debt. In the world of Venezia, Bassanio feels himself deficient for his inferiority in the art of mercantilism. To remedy this inferiority, he seeks a model to imitate and, he looks firstly to Antonio. Yet given the particular nature of debt and its consequent poor credit, Bassanio must impeach his model, proclaiming his desire to recoup his losses, like the bold gambler, with a single stroke:

I owe you much, and like a wilful youth,
That which I owe is lost. But if you please
To shoot another arrow that self way
Which you did shoot the first, I do not doubt,
As I will watch the aim, or to find both
Or bring your latter hazard back again,
And thankfully rest debtor for the first.12

>>12888676
Antonio has no available money for Bassanio, having neither money nor commodity to raise a present sum.13 Yet, being a virtuous Christian, and in imitation of the Father of the Prodigal Son,14 Antonio lends his name and credit to Bassanio. The first consequence of this malignancy is involvement with the Jews. For only Jews are allowed to lend money at interest, and only the Jewish Shylock will lend money to Bassanio.

Here, Shakespeare makes the usurious distinction of Christian and Jew explicit. Where Antonio admits: I neither lend nor borrow by taking nor by giving of excess;15 Shylock complains of Antonio: I hate him for he is a Christian, but more for that in low simplicity he lends out money gratis and brings down the rate of usance here with us in Venice.16 Having doubly confessed his hatred of Antonio17, Shylock falls into obsequies18; he knows the ruin guaranteed by his usury. Antonio, the virtuous Christian, recognises Shylock’s hypocrisy:

If thou wilt lend this money, lend it not
As to thy friends, for when did friendship take
A breed for barren metal of his friend?
But lend it rather to thine enemy,
Who, if he break, thou mayst with better face
Exact the penalty.19

Yet, befuddled by Shylock’s terms, Antonio assents to the loan. For by Shylock’s admission, a pound of man’s flesh taken from a man is not so estimable, profitable neither,20 and Antonio thus concludes there is much kindness in the Jew.21 Contradicting the moral dictates of the logos, Bassanio was encumbered by debt. And by his Christian virtue, Antonio is thus infected with this malignancy. Now the Christians, Bassanio and Antonio, are bound to the Jewish Shylock.

Act III begins with Antonio defaulting on his loan, and Shylock, motivated by his simultaneous revenge and triumph over his Christian rival, is unmoved by the pleas and payments proffered by Bassanio and Portia. Shylock later admits his mindless desire for violence:

You’ll ask me why I rather choose to have
A weight of carrion flesh than to receive
Three thousand ducats. I’ll not answer that,
But say it is my humour. Is it answered?
…
So can I give no reason, nor I will not,
More than a lodged hate and a certain loathing
I bear Antonio, that I follow thus
A losing suit against him. Are you answered?22

Antonio, recognising the rejection of Logos, restrains the attempts at reasoning of Bassanio:

You may as well use question with the wolf
Why he hath made the ewe bleat for the lamb;
You may as well forbid the mountain pines
To wag their high tops and to make no noise
When they are fretten with the gust of heaven;
You may as well do anything most hard
As seek to soften that than which what’s harder? –
His Jewish heart.23

>>12888684
Portia, masquerading as Balthazar, a doctor of the law, replies, in reaction to Shylock’s ignorance of mercy:

The quality of mercy is not strained.
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
’Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The thronèd monarch better than his crown.
His scepter shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptered sway.
It is enthronèd in the hearts of kings;
It is an attribute to God Himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s
When mercy seasons justice.24

The expression here crosses several layers. At its most obvious, Portia is extolling the supremacy of divine mercy over the regal, legal and political powers. At the second level, it is a critique of mercantilism, of its disintegration of the social order, relaxation of restraints and encouragement of mimetic rivalry. The highest level is the moral superiority of transcendent Christianity over material Judaism. This expression is then doubly confirmed with the conversion to Christianity of Shylock; for Shylock is thus stripped of his usurious position; and his own marks of communal malignancy.

Unthinkingly appealing to vengeance, to remove the itch of his resentment for Antonio, Shylock resembles the fairy tale’s fool. For he makes the wrong wish and comes to ironic grief with its granting. The Jewish preference for hateful justice is this exposed as inferior to mercy of Christianity. Shylock’s apparent sickness is the result of a realisation: he has managed to live in such a way that his every interaction with others has generated the maximum amount of failure, anger, despair and humiliation for all those involved, especially, by the conclusion of the play, himself.

>>12888685
However, the Bard is unfinished. Shylock’s daughter is herself newly converted to Christianity, and Lorenzo, her husband, now provides her with insight into the Logos apparent in the harmony of the spheres:

Here will we sit and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears; soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony.
Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold.
There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still choiring to the young-eyed cherubins.
Such harmony is in immortal souls,
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.25

Jessica has never been made merry by music. For, being Jewish, she is blind to beauty, harmony and order. Here, Lorenzo expresses the malignancy of the Jew, and beings the restoration of Jessica’s sight through music:

The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affections dark as Erebus.

Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music.26

Jessica exists as a necessary foil of her father; and as the obverse of Antonio. Where Antonio shares Shylock’s merchantry, Jessica shares his malignancy of Judaism; where Shylock condemns himself to hysteria and hatred, Jessica rises to Christian love. Shakespeare thus twice provides us with characters who resist the draw into mimetic rivalry and violence, doubly justifying the condemnation of Shylock for his barbarous descent.

>>12888695
There is no doubt then, that those renditions of Shylock as a tragic hero are contortions of Shakespeare’s intention. Yes, Shakespeare treats his Jew with far greater humanity, and far less greatness, than Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, but Shylock is a low character and unworthy of tragedy. Thus the malignant flux of Jewry does not infect Shylock’s fellows but is necessarily dispelled. The fairytale irony of the court’s justice is only a spice to the triumph of the higher, freer and nobler humanity of Catholicsm.

The Merchant of Venice is a rejection of competitive materialism and rightly directs its audience to the social unity of mercy. At the secondary level, it is a differentiation of the philosophies of the Catholic and the Jew. And at its deepest level, it is a denial of social custom over natural right; of the supremacy and necessity of Logos.

1. Aristotle, Politics, i,10.
2. Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Second Part of the Second Part, Question 78, Article I.
3. Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Second Part of the Second Part, Question 78, Article II.
4. Dante Alighieri, Divina Commedia, Canto XIV.
5. Charles P. Kindleberger, A Financial History of Western Europe, p49.
6. Merchant of Venice, 3.3.24-25.
7. Merchant of Venice, 3.1.57-65.
8. Pope Pius XI, De Consociatione vulgo « Amici Israel » abolenda
9. Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta, Act I.
10. Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta, Act I.
11. Merchant of Venice, 3.1.65-72.
12. Merchant of Venice, 1.1.153-159.
13. Merchant of Venice, 1.1.185-186.
14. Luke 15:21.
15. Merchant of Venice, 1.3.63-64.
16. Merchant of Venice, 1.3.42-45.
17. Merchant of Venice, 1.3.116-139.
18. Merchant of Venice, 1.3.149-153.
19. Merchant of Venice, 1.3.142-147.
20. Merchant of Venice, 1.3.177-178.
21. Merchant of Venice, 1.3.165.
22. Merchant of Venice, 4.1.41-44, 60-63.
23. Merchant of Venice, 4.1.74-81.
24. Merchant of Venice, 4.1.190-203.
25. Merchant of Venice, 5.1.63-73.
26. Merchant of Venice, 5.1.92-97.

>>12888377
yes

>>12888669
>>12888675
>>12888676
>>12888684
>>12888685
>>12888695
>>12888698
holy... I want more

>>12888773
jealous hack

>>12888888
i know. They’re thinking is so much their it’s not even relevant to from the beginning so it’s so weird seeing something like that and it happens almost like they mean it to they’re reading.

>>12888888
Based

>>12888888
Praised be the get!
Praise to the sexts!

>>12888888
can't argue with those digits

>>12888888
HHHHHH

>>12888888
>jealous
really nigga?

>>12888888
*click*
yeah, this one’s goin in the based file

>>12888901
>mediocre playwright hates shakespeare, homer and one of the finest prose stylists in the english language
yup, jelly

>>12888377
Did Shakespeare ever admit to ripping off Hesiod

>>12888926
>hasn't read the autobiography
pleb

>>12888888
Sextet of truth. I remember Shaw's "analysis" of Wagner's Ring. When he reaches Gotterdammerung, he is forced to admit that his attempt at an overarching explanation of the poem must be abandoned - but don't worry because he's now got a host of excuses.

>>12888888
oh fak :DD