Dramatis Personae Continued
Shylock
Shylock, the Jew of Venice, has become the
outstanding character in the play—in fact, almost from its first performance
the comedy came to be known as his rather than Antonio’s, the real merchant of
Venice. He is certainly the most complex
and intriguing figure in the comedy. It is important to keep in mind that
Shylock is an Italian Jew, that is, he is not like most modern stereotypes of
Jew who are Ashkenazi—Yiddish-speakers from Central and Eastern Europe, the
lands of Ashkenaz. Nor is he a Sephardic
Jew from Spain or Portugal who speaks Ladino or Judeo-Español. Nor is he a North African or Yemenite Jew who
speaks Arabic. Italian Jews were much
more involved in their host cultures, sometimes as musicians and dancing
masters, sometimes as silk-growers and merchants or viticulturalists, and
rarely as money-lenders. Money-lending
in Italy was as much an activity of Lombards and Genoans as Jews, and the
stereotype of the Jewish money-lender is a particularly nasty anti-Semitic
libel. It is therefore only very
reluctantly that Shylock agrees to help Antonio and Bassanio by lending money,
and perhaps too why he is unconcerned with charging interest. But Shylock is also a type from the English
stage, and thus needs to be contrasted with his closest cousin Christopher
Marlow’s Jew of Malta (1589/1590)
Shylock
is often confused with that cousin, the ridiculous Barabas. Why? Because from one angle, Shakespeare’s
character can be seen as an unadulterated villain, motivated by hatred of
Christians and driven by an in eradicable Jewish love of money; because he is
unmerciful towards Antonio in the matter of the pound of flesh, he deserves no
mercy from Christian Venice and is justly punished by confiscation of his
wealth and forced conversion to Christianity.
It is very likely that Shakespeare wanted his audiences to start off
thinking the Jew in his play was like Barabas, the devilish Jew, in the other
play. Marlow’s Jew, however, is a
grotesque caricature, very much a masked reveler on the streets who prances
about like all the other clowns, and whose actions are shaped by a long
tradition of anti-Jewish stereotypes, satire and theological hatred. From what Shylock describes as the treatment
shown to him by Antonio, it would seem the merchant regards Shylock in those
very simplistic terms, and this is also how the Jew imagines he and his fellows
are perceived by most Venetians.
In a sense then, both for the audience and the
players in The Merchant of Venice,
what is happening in this theatrical experience is at once a reflection of
carnival in Venice—one that might be seen in a raree or puppet show—and one of those so-called problem comedies
where Shakespeare darkens the lens to bring out more serious themes and
circumstances, and above all develops persons with many dimensions of
personality behind their superficial masks and with psychological and
historical depth.
In other words, it is not completely wrong for
modern audiences, taking their cue from contemporary producers, directors and
actors, as well as critics, to be appalled by what seems like an anti-Semitic
play, but no one should stop at this point.
This is where the drama really begins, and this is where the comedy develops,
from the point where disgust and horror at the horror of a character demanding
his pound of flesh begins to be revealed as something else. Nor is it all wrong to have feelings of
sympathy for Shylock the stage villain when he reminds the spectators in the
theatre that he is a man like all other men. Again the stirrings of such
sentimentality should not be allowed to stand as a mere softening of the
mockery and satire of the Jews: because Shylock is a serious trickster indeed…
but how subversive is he, whether to the Catholic citizens of Venice, whether
to the Protestant audience sitting in late Elizabethan London, or whether to
the Jews then and now?
From another angle, Shylock is the victim of
the play, at worst a foolish old man driven mad by the betrayal of his daughter
Jessica. This other perspective shines
through the lens of the speech Shylock makes about his common humanity and
shared feelings of insult by other Jews when
confronted by prejudice. There is
also a sting at the end of this speech because the Jew does not speak of
turning the other cheek, showing forgiveness to those who transgress his basic
human rights, or seeking some kind of reconcilement or understanding. As the long monologue makes clear as the
probable route the plot of the comedy will take, treated with contempt by
Antonio and others in Venice, Shylock will grasp the unexpected opportunity to
hurt the man who spat on him and the others who connived to make his daughter
elope with Lorenzo, stealing his wealth and pouring scorn on her father and his
religion. His villainy therefore is at
first seemingly understandable, if not excusable, and perhaps he is the only
villain in all of Shakespeare who has some reason to be cruel. In order to see how the wit of the revenge
mooted by Shylock articulates itself not straightforwardly as an inevitable
consequence of the violence shown by Antonio—to take advantage of the
merchant’s vulnerability, gullibility and misperception of the world: Antonio
is willing to borrow more money than he can safely risk out of his love for a
friend, a love, as we shall see further, tainted by its criminal collusion in
tricking Portia out of her independence and heritage; blinded by his hatred of
all Jews and by his self-righteousness, the merchant is easily duped by
Shylock’s slick words and humble posturing;
an d he is unable to reflect on his own melancholic state as a lens
through which he might more accurately measure the realities around him, more
than just in the mutability of meteorological conditions or in the vagaries of
politics, but in the contradictions, hypocrisies and limitations of Christian
legalism and idealism.
From still another angle we can see something
quite different in Shylock. What is
familiar becomes unhinged from the expectations of the festival stereotypes,
just as it does from the political concerns of Christendom as it feels itself
being pulled apart by seismic forces of Reformation, threatened externally by a
powerful Islamic caliphate still surging towards the West, undermined by new
discoveries of New Worlds filled with nations and cultures never before
conceived of, by new dimensions of reality above exposed by telescopes and
beneath normal perceptions by microscopes, and by changes to the philosophies
of Europe that find outside of medieval Christian hegemony unsettling notions
of equality, tolerance and social mobility.
This change of the familiar into the disturbing and the confusing is
called by Freud the unheimlich, the
uncanny.
There is thus something uncanny in this
comedy. From the beginning, when Antonio
annoucnes that he is sad but neither he nor his friends can determine the
cause for this sense of discomfort, this lack of fit, this loss of security in
the mind and in the world. The unheimlich then spreads out to other
places on the stage. When Bassanio
accosts Shylock on behalf of Antonio about lending money to the merchant,
Shylock is reluctant; and when Antonio himself asks for the loan without making
the least conciliatory move to apologize for the way he has treated the Jew in
the street, Shylock not only unexpectedly agrees to help the merchant out—as he
need not necessarily do, and would be understandably forgiven for refusing on
account of the harsh things Antonio continues to say: but unaccountably Shylock
agrees to the deal without demanding any interest at all, adding only somewhat
hesitantly a whimsical condition—the repayment of a pound of flesh in case of
default of cash.
In other words, in spite of all the contempt
shown to him, Shylock does a good deed—a merciful act: to lend money without
interest to help someone he doesn’t particularly like out of a bad spot and in
order to enable Bassanio to pursue his wooing of Portia. None of the Christians who party to this
arrangement question Shylock’s motives or seek to interpret them in any way,
since they see him as a complete other and accept his momentary weakness, as it
seems to them, as some special favor of Providence. They actually know nothing about the
money-lender, the Jews in the Ghetto, or the depths and complexities of
Talmudic Judaism as a religion.
In this moment of striking the bargain, there
is no reason for anyone to expect that Antonio will default on his repayment of
the loan, or that the condition of the pound of flesh is anything but a whimsy,
a witty flourish to show how little Shylock cares about money or revenge. All the hints of natural, supernatural and
psychological complexities pass the Christians by: their social and moral
superiority is unquestioned. They also
feel protected by the laws of Venice and its government and judiciary. For them all, Jews are a minor, sometimes
necessary, irritant in the body politic, but have no part to play in the course
of history. Everything changes, though,
when Shylock demands the pound of flesh, even when Antonio’s friends and Portia
are willing to put up three or four times the amount of money necessary. At that point, too, the Jew does not operate
strictly in terms of greed. What has
happened?
Some Jewish Speculations
Florence Amit
suggested that Shylock is not a professional money-lender at all, but only an
occasional one, and that rather he is a scholar or teacher in the community.[1]
Could his name, when written in Hebrew sh-l-ch
שּﬥﬤ be related to the word shaliach meaning an emissary, a representative, and agent of the
Jewish community? At the time when the play opens, he has found out he is
differing from a terminal illness. This
knowledge, on the one hand, creates a crisis in terms of his domestic and
professional life; and on the other, provides an opportunity for him to act
against the State without having to face middle or long term consequences. Because of his impending demise, he is
concerned to ensure the safety and well-being of his daughter Jessica, and that
means finding her a suitable husband, someone whom he can trust to care for her
and to oversee the jewels and other wealth he will bestow on her before his
goods are subject to various taxes, fines and duties. Shylock believes he can best provide for her
by removing his wealth from the jurisdiction of the Venetian Republic and from
the local version of the Inquisition which would confiscate all or most of his
wealth upon his demise or at least upon report of his dealings with Crypto-Jews
in the city and beyond its boundaries in Turkish land across the Aegean. Amit’s reading also suggests that this worthy
husband-to-be is a recently arrived Marrano, someone who knows how to act
cautiously and cunningly to hide his true intentions from the Doge’s Council
and the Church, but who has a sense of ethics and morality in regard to the
Jewish community and its members.
Antonio’s eagerness to secure a loan from a money-lender and his record
of bigotry against the Jews makes him a good candidate to be played with in
order to set this plot in motion.
While Florence Amit’s
essays on these questions may seem a bit over the top to academic critics
because they presume too much of a sympathy for the Jews in the play and require
an overly-ingenious interpretation of the comedy based on multi-lingual puns
and complicated, abstruse allusions to biblical, midrashic and kabbalistic
writings, the general principles do stand up and are confirmed by more
conventional readings of the various plot-threads Shakespeare has woven
together from diverse Renaissance and earlier sources. In other words, we need not force The Merchant of Venice into a
Procrustean Bed as a secret Jewish drama.
Sufficient use of rabbinical wit and Jewish secular jokes can be added
to the main directions of the play outlined in earlier sections of this essay,
above all Christian hypocrisy, Venice’s excessive pride in its ability to
negotiate between legalism and commercial expediency, and foolish posturing
about love and friendship. These other
jokes belong to the same satirical tradition as seen in Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), wherein
half- and slightly off-centered quotations and allusions point towards deeper
Christian and Humanist ideals than the commonplace fudging and self-delusion
operate.
