Shylock

• 1. Introduction

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  Shylock loans 3,000 ducats to a Christian merchant named Antonio, and he sets the security at a pound of Antonio's flesh. That single clause turned a fictional Venetian Jewish moneylender into one of the most argued-over figures in all of William Shakespeare's plays. He appears in The Merchant of Venice, written around 1600, and the First Folio spells his name Shylocke. For four centuries, audiences have asked the same uncomfortable questions about him. Is he the play's principal villain, built from stereotypes of greed and vengefulness? Or is he a wronged man whose defense slowly becomes an accusation against everyone around him? Here is a stranger fact still. There were no legally practising Jews living in England during Shakespeare's time. Edward I had expelled them in 1290, in the Edict of Expulsion, a ban that was not reversed until the mid-17th century. So Shakespeare wrote his Jew for a country that had not seen Jews in three hundred years.

• 2. A Name From Genesis

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  Shylock is not a Jewish name, which is the first puzzle for anyone studying the character. Some scholars believe it probably derives from the biblical name Salah, written שלח in Hebrew, and also rendered as Shalah or Shelach in English texts. Shalah is described as the grandson of Shem and the father of Eber, the biblical progenitor of the Hebrews. Every Jewish character in the play takes a name from minor figures listed in the genealogies of the Book of Genesis. Shakespeare may have intended the name to be said with a short i, closer to SHILL-ock, rather than the long i most people use now. The modern pronunciation may have shifted because the standard spelling with a y signals a long i to readers. Other scholars push back on the Hebrew theory entirely. They note that Shylock was a common sixteenth-century English name, familiar to Shakespeare's fellow Londoners, with a Saxon origin meaning white-haired. The scholar Stephen Orgel, a Stanford professor and general editor of The Pelican Shakespeare series from Penguin, records that the real Shylocks of sixteenth-century London included goldsmiths, mercers, and most visibly of all, scriveners.

• 3. The Bond And The Trial

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  Antonio defaults, bankrupt, and Shylock comes to collect his pound of flesh. The demand is not abstract greed. Antonio had insulted Shylock, physically assaulted him, and spat on him in the Rialto, the stock exchange of Venice, dozens of times. He had defiled the Jewish religion and inflicted massive financial losses. Shylock's daughter Jessica sharpens the wound further. She falls in love with Antonio's friend Lorenzo, converts to Christianity, leaves her father's house, and steals vast riches from him, hardening his resolve for revenge. The courtroom turns against him through Portia, Antonio's well-wisher. Shylock is charged with the attempted murder of a Christian, a crime that carries a possible death penalty, while Antonio walks free without punishment. The verdict orders Shylock to surrender half his wealth and property to the state and the other half to Antonio. Then Antonio offers what he calls mercy. He asks only for half of Shylock's wealth, for his own and Lorenzo's needs, on two conditions. Shylock must bequeath all his remaining property to Lorenzo and Jessica after his death, and he must immediately convert to Christianity. Forced to agree, Shylock exits the play citing illness.

• 4. Why A Moneylender

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  Money-lending was one of the few occupations still open to Jews in the Middle Ages, and that history sits behind every line Shylock speaks about ducats. Christians could not offer interest-bearing loans, which were then considered the sin of usury, so the work fell to others. Jews were excluded from many fields. Most Christian kings forbade them to own land for farming or to serve in government, and craft guilds usually refused to admit them as artisans. The stereotype of the Jewish moneylender outlived the people themselves, surviving in England long after the expulsion of 1290. The scholar Hyam Maccoby reads the play through an even older frame. He argues it is built on medieval morality plays and exemplum, in which the Virgin Mary, here represented by Portia, argues for the forgiveness of human souls against the implacable accusations of the Devil, here represented by Shylock.

• 5. From Clown To Tragic Hero

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  Edmund Kean changed everything in the first half of the 19th century when he began playing Shylock sympathetically, and the role established his reputation as an actor. Before Kean, the part had been performed by a comedian as a repulsive clown, or as a monster of unrelieved evil. Henry Irving carried the sympathetic line to its height with an aristocratic, proud Shylock, first seen at the Lyceum in London in 1879, with Ellen Terry as Portia. The portrayal has been called the summit of his career. Not every great actor agreed. Edwin Booth played Shylock as a simple villain, even though his father, Junius Brutus Booth, had portrayed the character sympathetically. Jacob Adler, the most notable of the early 20th-century actors in the role, performed it in Yiddish inside an otherwise English-language production. His Shylock evolved over the years, from a stock Shakespearean villain, to a man overcome by revenge, and finally to a man who acted not from revenge but from pride. In a 1902 interview with Theater magazine, Adler insisted Shylock was rich enough to forgo the interest on three thousand ducats, and that Antonio was far from the chivalrous gentleman he is made to appear.

• 6. Sequels And Reimaginings

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  St. John Ervine imagined what happened next in his 1924 play The Lady of Belmont, a sequel where the characters meet again some years later. All the marriages that ended The Merchant of Venice have turned unhappy, Antonio is an obsessive bore reminiscing about his escape from death, but Shylock, freed from religious prejudice, is richer than before and a close friend and confidant of the Doge. Arnold Wesker rewrote the relationship entirely in The Merchant in 1976. In his version, Shylock and Antonio are friends who share a disdain for the crass antisemitism of the Christian community's laws. Mark Leiren-Young turned the controversy itself into theater with his award-winning monologue Shylock in 1996. It follows a Jewish actor named Jon Davies, cast as Shylock in a production that closes abruptly over accusations of antisemitism, addressing the audience at a talk-back session. Composed in one 80-minute act, it premiered at Bard on the Beach on the 5th of August 1996, directed by John Juliani and starring the Canadian radio host David Berner. Its American debut came in 1998 at Philadelphia's Walnut Street Theatre, where William Leach starred.

• 7. Propaganda And A Synonym

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  Shortly after Kristallnacht in 1938, German radio broadcast a production of The Merchant of Venice to reinforce stereotypes, and the Nazis used Shylock for their propaganda. Productions followed in Lübeck in 1938, Berlin in 1940, and elsewhere within Nazi-occupied territory. Under Nazi rule in 1943, the Vienna Burgtheater staged a notoriously extreme version with Werner Krauss as an evil Shylock. The play had long carried that charge. Its 1619 edition bore the subtitle With the Extreme Cruelty of Shylock the Jew, and the Quarto title page shows it was sometimes known as The Jew of Venice, echoing Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta and its comically wicked villain Barabas. The character's name eventually escaped the stage entirely. It became a synonym for loan shark, and to shylock as a verb means to lend money at exorbitant rates. The phrase pound of flesh entered the lexicon as slang for an onerous or unpleasant obligation. In the early 20th century, doctors were sometimes called Shylocks for their supposed exorbitant charges, a label one medical journal paper answered with the ironic question, Is the doctor a Shylock?

• 8. Hath Not A Jew Eyes

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  If you prick us, do we not bleed? That line belongs to one of Shakespeare's most eloquent speeches, given to Shylock himself, asking whether a Jew has eyes, hands, organs, dimensions, and senses, fed with the same food and hurt with the same weapons as a Christian. Many modern readers hear the play as a plea for tolerance, with Shylock as a sympathetic figure and his trial a mockery of justice, since Portia acts as a judge when she has no real right to do so. The actor Alexander Granach, who played Shylock in Germany in the 1920s, asked how Shylock's defense becomes an accusation, and answered that Shakespeare gave him flesh and blood, human greatness, spiritual strength, and a great loneliness. Michael Radford's 2004 film, starring Al Pacino, opens with a montage of how the Christian population abuses the Jewish community. One of its last shots underlines the cost of the forced conversion. As a convert, Shylock would have been cast out of the Jewish community in Venice, no longer allowed to live in the ghetto, yet never fully accepted by the Christians who would remember his Jewish birth. In 2016, for the 500-year anniversary of the Venetian Ghetto, The Merchant of Venice was performed in the ghetto's main square, with Shylock played by five actors, four men and a woman.