Page:Works of Heinrich Heine 01.djvu/393

Rh saw this piece played in Drury Lane there stood behind me in the box a pale British beauty who, at the end of the fourth act, wept passionately, and many times cried out, "The poor man is wronged!" It was a countenance of noblest Grecian cut, and the eyes were large and black. I have never been able to forget them, those great black eyes which wept for Shylock! When I think of those tears I must include the Merchant of Venice among the tragedies, although the frame of the work is a composition of laughing masks and sunny faces, satyr forms and amorets, as though the poet meant to make a comedy. Shakespeare perhaps intended originally to please the mob, to represent a thorough going wehr-wolf, a hated fabulous being who yearns for blood, and pays for it with daughter and with ducats, and is over and above laughed to scorn. But the genius of the poet, the spirit of the wide world which ruled in him, was ever stronger than his own will, and so it came to pass that he in Shylock, despite the glaring grotesqueness, expressed the justification of an unfortunate sect which was oppressed by providence, from inscrutable motives, with the