True, ideas are important, perhaps life's most precious treasures. But have we not gone overboard in stressing their significance? Have we not actually developed idea worship?

Ideas we must have, and we seek them everywhere. We scour literature for them; here we find stored the wisdom of great minds. But are all these works worthy of consideration? Can they stand rigid scrutiny?

Shakespeare's wit and wisdom, his profound insight into human nature, have stood the test of centuries. But was he infallible in all things? What of his treatment of the Jew in The Merchant of Venice?

Shakespeare gives us a vivid picture of Shylock, but probably he never saw a Jew, unless in some of his travels. The Jews had been banished from England in 1290 and were not permitted to return before 1655, when Shakespeare had been dead for thirty-nine years. If any had escaped expulsion by hiding, they certainly would not frequent the market-place.

Shakespeare did not usually invent the incidents in his plays, but borrowed them from old stories, ballads, and plays, wove them together, and then breathed into them his spark of life. Rather than from a first-hand study of Jewish people, his delineation of Shylock stems from a collection of Italian stories, Il Pecorone, published in 1558, although written almost two centuries earlier. He could learn at second hand from books, but could not thus capture the real Jewish spirit. Harris J. Griston, in Shaking The Dust From Shakespeare (216), writes: ``There is not a word spoken by Shylock which one would expect from a real Jew.''