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The Jew that Shakespeare Drew
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
How far is it legitimate for a director to correct Shakespeare’s antisemitism in The Merchant of Venice?
SO, begging a question or two, wrote the theatre critic Benedict Nightingale in a review of a recent London production of the play in which the Christians were portrayed as rabid Nazis. Almost fifty years after the Holocaust, it appears, it is still difficult for directors and critics alike to approach The Merchant without a feeling of unease. Current wisdom—or lingering guilt—insists that the play is, in a real and unacceptable sense, racist.
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- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1992
References
1 The Times, 8 Feb. 1991, p. 18. [My italics.]
2 Sanders, Wilbur, The Dramatist and the Received Idea (Cambridge, 1968)Google Scholar, ch. 3.
3 Barker, Harley Granville, Prefaces to Shakespeare, Second Series (London, 1935), P. 83.Google Scholar
4 I am not discussing here the later ‘dark comedies’, All’s Well that Ends Well, Measure for Measure, and Troilus and Cressida.
5 That is, in the sense that he can ever be found taking sides in an Anglican/Puritan/Roman Catholic debate.
6 Sanders, Received Idea, p. 14.
7 Ibid., p. 12.
8 Ibid., pp. 15.
9 Ibid., pp. 15-16.
10 Sir Hunter, Mark, ‘Spiritual Values in Shakespeare’, in Burkitt, F. C., ed., Speculum Religionis; (Oxford, 1929), pp. 116, 118.Google Scholar
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24 Even so, Lloyd Jones makes no mention of John Foxe and lays no stress on John Jewel’s Heb raicism as disseminated through the English Homilies: Vincenette d’Uzer, ‘The Jews in the Sixteenth-century Homilies’, pp. 265-77, above. He also ignores the claim of Theodore K. Rabb: ‘The stirrings of the 1590s and the return of the Jews to England’, TJHSE, 26 (1979), p. 26, that Richard Hooker be accorded a place of honour because, as a member of the Establishment, ‘he did more to alter the consciousness of the people who ruled the land than had a dozen Professors of Hebrew or minor theologians.’ In the light of Lloyd Jones’s own researches, and the wider Jewish community unearthed by Roger Prior, perhaps the claim was overstated.
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31 Rabb, ‘The Stirrings of the 1590s’, p. 26:‘… perhaps the most strident antisemitism England had seen since the days of the expulsion under Edward I’.
32 Collins, D. C., A Handlist of News Pamphlets 1590-1610 (London [Thurrock], 1943), p. 30 Google Scholar:there was only one news pamphlet on the subject, A True Report of Sundry Horrible Conspiracies …, printed by Charles Yetsweirt Esq. in November 1594. Yetsweirt, otherwise unknown as a printer, was by profession a Clerk of the Signet, and was thus in a position to receive and disseminate special information. The pamphlet was therefore perhaps a ‘government puff’ rather than a response to popular interest.
33 The Sacred Wood (London, 1920; 4th edn, 1934), p. 92.
34 The prevailing tendency is still to regard the play as unremittingly anti-Semitic. This seems to me untenable, and thus the argument of Yates, Frances A., The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (London, 1979), pp. 115–25, 203–4 Google Scholar, that Marlowe was an intellectual reactionary assailing the tendencies of Renaissance magic and Christian Hebraism in general, and the Earl of Leicester’s circle in particular, is here omitted from the discussion.
35 Sanders, Received Idea, pp. 41, 43–4.
36 See below, p. 291. And for the notion of a Jew-usurer biting, see Henry Smith, Examination of Usury, p. 96.
37 The Merchant of Venice, ed. M. M. Mahood, New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 21-2 [hereafter Mahood].
38 Mahood, p. 1.
39 Mahood, p. 8, suggests that Marlowe presented Shakespeare with ‘a challenge rather than a source’, and speaks of a ‘fruitful and creative resistance to Marlowe’s play’.
40 Mahood, p. 9, prefers this description to ‘fairy tale’, which term can induce ‘a dangerous condescension in the reader and a dangerous whimsy in the director’.
41 See ‘The Myth of Venice’ in Mahood, pp. 12-15.
42 Hunt, Hugh, Old Vic Prefaces (London, 1954), p. 150.Google Scholar
43 Antonio, and not Shylock, is the ‘Merchant’ of the title.
44 I.ii.33-74.
45 Hunt, Old Vic Prefaces, p. 152.
46 Quoted in Mahood, p. 72n., and in The Merchant of Venice, ed. John Russell Brown, New Arden Edition (London, 1955), p. 24n. [hereafter Russell Brown].
47 The commentators have shirked the task of asking why Shylock finds the word ‘interest’ so repugnant. If Mr Tavernor (p. 282 above) could differentiate berween interest as good and usury as evil, why does Shakespeare make Shylock balk at the word? The answer is that ‘interest’ had quite recently changed its meaning. In medieval Latin usage, ‘interest’ differed from ‘usury’ in that the latter was avowedly a charge for the use of money (forbidden by canon law); whereas ‘interest’ referred to compensation which, under Roman law, was due from a debtor who had defaulted (OED: ‘interest’, sb. 10.a). Shylock does not recognize canon law; regarding his ‘thrift’ and ‘usances’ as quite legitimate, he takes exception to Antonio’s equating them with the much more unpalatable business of exacting a penalty from a defaulter. With this subtle semantic point, Shakespeare introduces the central issue of the Shylock-Antonio story: Shylock objects to the suggestion that his business practices smack of revenge; in the event he pursues his revenge mercilessly.
48 Mahood, p. 73n.
49 I.iii.56-7.
50 The commentators have been largely confused by Shylock’s arguments and by Antonio’s contemptuous dismissal of them (I.iii.86-90). The latter passage in fact accords with general theological opinion on the subject, but is too eliptical, perhaps, to serve as a cogent dramatic argument. For discussion of Laban in contemporary treatises, see Arnold Williams, The Common Expositor (Chapel Hill, NC, 1948), pp. 170–3.
51 I.iii. 122-30.
52 Mahood, p. 24.
53 Henry Smith, The Examination of Usury, p. 95. [My italics.]
54 Ibid., p. 104.
55 Mahood, p. 92n.
56 Russell Brown, p. xli.
57 Earle, John, Micro-cosmographie, 5th edn (London, 1629), ed. Arber, Edward (London, 1869), pp. 99–100.Google Scholar
58 Russell Brown, p. xlii, following E. E. Stoll, finds in ‘wilderness of monkeys’ a ‘kind of comic climax by repetition’. This strikes me as grotesquely wide of the mark; it is surely a tragic climax by (typically Shakespearean) exaggeration.
59 Lack of pietas in daughters is one of Shakespeare’s abiding themes: Juliet, Desdemona, Celia, and Hermia spring readily to mind. In Shakespearean terms, Jessica is strong and admirable, not weak and contemptible. Strong-minded women fascinated Shakespeare, and strong-minded women who exhibit pietas without ‘denying’ themselves—Rosalind, Viola, Cordelia, and both Portias—are amongst his crowning achievements.
60 Russell Brown, p. xl.