SHYLOCK’S SPEECH IN SHAKESPEARE’S
PLAY
The father of the Indian nation
Mahatma Gandhi (Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi 1869-1948) said : “All Men Are
Brothers.”
The English poet, translator and
travel writer James Harold Kirkup (1918-2009) says in his poem titled NO MEN ARE FOREIGN:
Remember,
no men are strange, no countries foreign,
Beneath
all uniforms, a single body breathes
Like
ours : the land our brothers walk upon
Is
earth like this, in which we all shall lie.
And
in the concluding lines of his long poem The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the
English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) says:
He
prayeth well, who loveth well
Both
man and bird and beast.
He
prayeth best, who loveth best
All
things both great and small;
For
the dear God who loveth us
He
made and loveth all.
In
Act III , Scene 1 of his play Merchant of Venice, the British
poet-playwright William Shakespeare (1564-1616 ), reproduces
a famous speech by Shylock, a money-lender Jew, treated unfairly
by Antonio , a Christian who has taken
loan but not repaid , thus entitling Shylock to take a pound of Antonio’s flesh
as per a clause of the written agreement.
The core idea of the speech is that Shylock has the right to be as
revengeful to Christians as they are to Jews.
Here
is full text of Shylock’s speech.
I
am a Jew
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,
heal’d
by the same means,
warm’d
and cool’d 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?
And
if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?
*******
G.R.Kanwal
20 May 2026
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