【正文】 ifferent treatment, respects—such as honesty or courage or intelligence—that are uncontroversially held ... to be acceptable as a basis for treating people differently” (5). It is through this racism that one believes negroes simply lack intellectual capacities and Jews are avaricious, and they should be treated accordingly. The second type of racism is “intrinsic racism.” It believes that “each race has a different moral status, quite independent of the moral characteristics entailed by its racial essence” (6). Thus, intrinsic racism will nurse “race feeling” or “feeling of munity,” which is much like “family feeling,” and preach for racial solidarity just as PanAfricanism or Zionism has done, while extrinsic racism will only result in racial hatred or even oppression (1112). Shakespeare was no theorist and he had no scholarly expertise on racialism or racism. Nevertheless, Shakespeare has in his drama shown his prehensive knowledge of racial problems. As a matter of fact, Shakespeare’s plays have witnessed two basic types of racialism: one (represented by the Jew) is the type seeing differences or “otherness” in nurture (including religious belief and behavior), and the other (represented by the Moor) is the type seeing differences or “otherness” in nature (mainly such physical appearance as skin color). Based on these two types of racialism, Shakespeare’s plays then enact a wide variety of racism. Shakespeare never dichotomized racism into intrinsic and extrinsic racism. But his wide variety of racism can be classified, too, into two sorts, much like Appiah’s assortment. In plain terms, the two categories may be called “racism of pride” and “racism of prejudice,” corresponding to Appiah’s “intrinsic racism” and “extrinsic racism” respectively. It is only natural that one should love one’s own race. But one cannot love one’s own race without taking pride in one or more characteristics of one’s own race, just as a giraffe cannot love its own species without taking pride in, say, its long neck. It may be remembered that, in The Merchant of Venice, Jessica says: Alack, what heinous sin is it in me To be ashamed to be my father’s child! But though I am a daughter to his blood I am not to his manners. (MV, )Jessica cannot take pride in her father’s manners and her father’s manners are considered to be those of a typical Jew. So, she decides to bee “a Christian” and Lorenzo’s “l(fā)oving wife” (MV, ), forsaking her cultural heritage, which all Jews share. While Jessica is just about to bee a Christian, Othello, as the play opens, “is not simply a Moor。C, ), while Philo is made to plain that Antony “is bee the bellows and the fan/To cool a gipsy’s lust” (Aamp。 the vast variety of human characters and societies.”1 Somehow, he has failed to mention the theme of race. Race is, of course, part of nature, and each human race has always had its distinctive “image(s)” formed and known in various “societies.” Nevertheless, race was indeed not so important an issue in Shakespeare’s England as to bee a central theme of his drama. According to Michael D. Bristol, at the end of the 16th century “racism was not yet organized as a largescale system of oppressive social and economic arrangements, though it certainly existed as a widely shared set of feelings and attitudes” (181). The Merchant of Venice may be a play most obviously touching on the tension of Jews in a Christian society, and thus one can argue as to whether the play is antiSemitic or not. Yet, as the title suggests, the play is mainly about “the merchant of Venice,” that is, Antonio, who embodies friendship or love of the highest degree, against usury or any mercenary form of profit that is often associated with merchants. Although the play is “otherwise called ‘The Iewe of Venyce,’”2 and it is certainly Shylock’s tragedy and often performed as such,3 most people still regard it as a edy for Bassanio and Portia or as a tragicedy for Antonio. If the play, as C. L. Barber suggests, is to dramatize “the conflict between the mechanisms of wealth and the masterful, social use of it” (179), the emphasis is placed first and foremost on wealth as a personal, rather than racial, matter, for wealth is primarily one’s personal, rather than racial, belongings. Othello is another of Shakespeare’s plays that has the greatest potential to develop into a “problem play” about race. In its source tale, as Susan Snyder points out, Cinthio does not dwell much on the theme of skin color, but Shakespeare dwells on it a great deal in the play (31). And as Stephen Greenblatt puts it, “blackness is the indelible witness to Othello’s permanent status as an outsider” (45). Yet, as it is, the tragedy is primarily about jealousy,4 and Othello’s tragic fate lies more in his personality (. his rashness or gullibility) than in his racial situation: there is no racism detrimental enough to hinder him directly through racial hatred in his military or matrimonial life. The racial problem raised in the play is, at most, but a problem subordinate to the problem of villainy, which makes use of others’ personal traits as well as racial prejudices existing in a society. Three of Shakespeare’s other plays, namely Titus Andronicus, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest, also have characters other than “the white race”: Aaron the blackamoor, Cleopatra the Egyptian, and the Indianlike But who would think of these plays primarily in terms of racism? Aaron is but a convenient agent to bring forth Shakespeare’s revenge theme, Cleopatra a type of love overpowering political and military power, and Caliban an example depicting the master/servant relationship or the nature/nurture contrast. In none of these plays, as in neither The Merchant of Venice nor Othello, does the theme of race ever really e to the fore to bedim other possible themes. Although race was never Shak