Terror and Mutilation in the Golden Age

Abstract

The origins of nation-destroying and humanity-annihilating power of racism2 have been traced back to ideas prevalent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, prominent among which was a belief in the natural right of conquest, a belief based in turn upon a theory of the natural superiority of certain races or classes of human beings to others.3 Although the superman doctrine makes a debut as early as the Platonic dialogues,4 the notion that there is something different about the rise of that doctrine in our centurysomething more violent, more intellectual, more totalitarian has led some to view it as a distinctly modern phenomenon. My purpose here is to suggest that the modern form of the superman doctrine, with its justification of violence, conquest and terror, claims descent from one fearsomely developed in the Golden Age of the sixteenth century, and that the expression of that doctrine may be found in the dark undertones of a golden text, Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. This age, which we recall as the time of Elizabeth and Shakespeare, of Coke and Raleigh, had dawned in 1492 with what was thought to be the greatest event, excluding the Incarnation, since the creation of the world.5 No less important than the discovery of a new land was the discovery of its