I find it infinitely amusing when Shakespeare quotes get taken out of the context of the larger scenes they’re put in. Take, for example, the overused quote “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” It’s usually used as a plea for fairness, a humbly understated appeal to logic and the inherent humanity within us all.
But see, this quote comes from The Merchant of Venice, and is part of a larger speech given by Shylock (though its small by Shakespearian standards). If you look at the whole chunk of text, Shylock isn’t pleading or appealing. He is demanding - quite adamantly - for a literal pound of flesh from someone who owes him money. He’s not appealing to a shared humanity - he’s throwing generations of complete and systematic denial of humanity into the faces of his oppressors. He is angry, and he is bitter, and he has been for a long time, and this is the first time, the very first time that he has had the power to vent that anger and make it count for something. He’s not modestly reminding the Christians that he too is human. He is screaming in their faces with hate in his eyes and venom on his tongue that if his position were reversed, he would already have been flogged and stripped of everything that mattered to him. And so he’s going to do his level fucking best to outdo what would have been done to him, because he is just so done with Christian bullshit. He is tired of being treated like a dog, or worse, and he is going to have his pound of flesh.
This is not a nice phrase - it is full of spitfire and ire, and taking it out of that context, of an emotional outburst so powerful it all but chokes Shylock before he can really get rolling with the monologue in true Shakespearean fashion, and to take this phrase out of that context of that emotion? It robs it of its teeth, of its righteous anger, of its promise of inescapable consequence. Shylock has bled - he feels its the Christians’ turn. It’s a promise, a threat, and to take it out of that context is to muzzle an anger that is justified at every single fucking turn.
