SOURCE: “Shakespeare's Jew: Preconception and Performance,” in Shakespeare Studies, Vol. XX, 1988, pp. 261-68.

[In the essay below, Perret asserts that modern directors of The Merchant of Venice are wrong in worrying about Shakespeare's anti-Semitism, and claims that the playwright might in fact have been parodying his audience's views rather than pandering to them.]

Because Bernard Beckerman was so interested in the theater, for this panel on “The Merchant of Venice: Problems of Influence” I have chosen to consider some ways in which preconceptions about Jews in Shakespeare's time and ours have influenced performance. My hope is that approaching the play through the preconceptions of its audience can reveal something about how the play, if not the playwright, works and shed some light on the problem of Shakespeare's supposed anti-Semitism.

Underlying my consideration are two assumptions. The first is that Shakespeare, consciously or unconsciously, would have taken his audience's preconceptions into account in shaping both text and performance of The Merchant of Venice. The second is that most Elizabethan playgoers and many modern ones would equate the performance they see with Shakespeare's text. In the theater the play is, effectively, what the audience sees played; what they see played depends partly upon what they notice, and what they notice depends upon their preconceptions.

As a practical man of the theater, Shakespeare must have recognized that the audience of The Merchant of Venice would bring to the playhouse certain assumptions about Jews, whom the Elizabethans would have encountered only as Marranos, apparent converts to Christianity who practiced their old faith secretly (Roth 139-43). Shakespeare would have known that most in his audience thought Jews cold-hearted usurers and crucifiers of Christ. That anti-Semitism in Shakespeare's day was not based on race (Echeruo 5-8) is important because it explains why the Elizabethans could respond to some actions, such as Shylock's conversion under pressure, differently than we do. As Jonathan Miller notes, “if the Jew's fault stems from his failure to acknowledge Jesus as the Messiah,” that fault disappears when he consents to becoming a Christian (821). The Elizabethan playgoers would have paid attention not to Shylock's race but to his occupation and his religion; to both their immediate response would have been negative.

Although Shakespeare may have written the play to capitalize on excitement stirred up by Marlowe's The Jew of Malta and the trial of Dr. Lopez, this does not necessarily mean that Shakespeare intended to present his Jew as stereotypically villainous—he may instead have felt a need to show that Jews are men rather than monsters. Nor does it necessarily mean that Shakespeare intended to focus on the nature of the Jew rather than on the nature of the Christian. Marrano or Puritan, usurers in Elizabethan England were Christian, allowed by the law of 1571 to charge ten percent interest (Pettet 21); in The Description of England (1587) William Harrison speaks of usury as “a trade brought in by the Jews, now perfectly practiced almost by every Christian and so commonly that he is accounted but for a fool that doth lend this money for nothing” (as quoted in Danson 146). Theatergoers stimulated by the play into thinking about the abuse of usury would be likely to reflect as much upon the cruelty of English Christians as upon the cruelty of a Venetian Jew.

The stir caused by The Jew of Malta and the trial of Dr. Lopez does mean, however, that Shakespeare's audience had strong preconceptions of the Jew for the playwright to work with or against. Playgoers would take for granted ways in which the presentation of the Jew fit their preconceived image. Playgoers attentive enough to note ways in which the Jew did not fit their stereotype—such as Shylock's sentimental attachment to the ring given him by Leah before their marriage—would be struck by these deviations. Paradoxically, thinking in terms of stereotypes could lead the playgoer away from thinking in terms of stereotypes.

The text does not prepare playgoers to see a moneylender in Jewish gaberdine; Shylock's entrance in I.iii in exotic garb and makeup would have startled the first audience into attention. Their preconceptions about Jews, confirmed by Shylock's aside explaining his hatred of Antonio, would lead them to hear more sinister undertones to Shylock's offer than Antonio does. Shakespeare has carefully set up the sequence of what the moneylender tells us to stress certain preconceptions more than others. Shylock's first words emphasize money, and his first aside announces that he hates the merchant more for business reasons than for religious ones. Shylock's long tale about how Jacob made ewes breed, “inserted to make interest good,” irritates Antonio into insisting that the Jew get to the point; this should make the audience listen carefully for that point and consider not only how unconvincing the analogy is but also how convincing “Hath a dog money?” is. Shylock's point, “Is it possible / A cur can lend three thousand ducats?” is that self-interest should teach us to be humane to others, regardless of religion. Antonio's “The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose” warns the playgoers not to judge characters only by what they say, especially by what they say about religion. The way Shakespeare in I.iii plays with preconceptions about Jews and usurers works against our seeing religion as the central issue here. Because Shylock's first scene gives the moneylender as well as the merchant an opportunity to declare his feelings about the Jew's occupation and religion, Shylock, as Danson observes, “can be judged on the basis of what he will do in the course of the play, rather than on preconceived notions” (150).

Though The Merchant of Venice pleased King James so much that he ordered it played a second time during Shrovetide 1605 (Chambers 2: 332), we know almost nothing about how the play was originally presented and very little about how the audience perceived it. This is particularly frustrating because, as Styan points out, Shakespeare may have functioned like a modern director in shaping the performance (53), which would thus give us a clue as to his auctorial intentions. What contemporary evidence we have suggests that Shylock had theatrical impact out of proportion to the number of scenes in which he appears, but that this impact was not enough to change the play from comedy to tragicomedy or to give the bond plot predominance over the love plot.

There is no Elizabethan evidence that Shylock was perceived as a strong tragic element; the head- and running-titles of the first quarto (1600) call the play a “comicall Historie” (Chambers 1: 368), and Mere's list in Palladis Tamia (1598) includes it among the comedies. That the play was regarded as a comedy does not, however, mean that Shylock was originally presented as a comic villain, as Doggett played him in 1701, although the sight of Shylock with false nose and red wig and beard would work against serious or sympathetic consideration. Stage tradition cannot be indiscriminately relied upon in reconstructing the original performance. The tradition “that Shylock was intended as a comic figure,” Grebanier points out, “dates from Granville's perversion of the play” (313). The tradition that Richard Burbage was the first Shylock is questionable because the sole authority for it is some lines, presumably forged, added by Collier to the Elegy on the Death of Richard Burbadge (Furness 370). Baldwin, in working out the roles acted by each member of Shakespeare's company, assigns Shylock not to Burbage but to Thomas Pope, the “high comedian and gruff villain” of the company (246).

We might know more about Shakespeare's intent if we knew who played Shylock. If Burbage, the leading actor, played Shylock rather than Bassanio, the audience would give more, and more careful, attention to the Jew. Regardless of who played Shylock, the plot guarantees dramatic importance to the moneylender, although he appears in only five of the twenty scenes, and Shakespeare develops the moneylender's character more fully than did his source Il Pecorone.

Whatever the playwright's intention, that the Elizabethans found Shylock a powerful presence onstage is sugested by the title page of the first quarto, which announces “The most excellent Historie of the Merchant of Venice. With the extreame crueltie of Shylocke the Jewe towards the sayd Merchant, in cutting a just pound of his flesh: and the obtayning of Portia by the choyse of three chests.” Shylock is immediately individualized, pointed out by name, while Antonio, who gives the play its title, is referred to simply by his occupation.

Even so, the title page in no way indicates either that the play is focused on Shylock or that Shylock is seen as an opposite to Portia, the only other character accorded a name. The description calls attention to the casket scene rather than to Portia herself or to the intensely dramatic courtroom scene, although this must have appealed greatly in that litigious age. Instead of balancing Shylock's cruelty against Portia's charity or cleverness, the subtitles refer to Shylock's “crueltie” and Bassanio's “obtayning” of Portia—the polarity of values we have learned to see the characters as representing (Old Law/New Law, Justice/Mercy, getting/giving) appears not to have struck the Elizabethans as forcefully as it strikes us. Only in relation to Shylock does the title page draw on stereotypes: Shylock is referred to not as moneylender but as Jew, which for an Elizabethan effectively identifies his occupation, and the dominant impression of “extreame crueltie,” a popular preconception about money lenders, Jewish or Gentile, has eclipsed the fact that Shylock does not actually cut any flesh.

We naturally know more about modern preconceptions and performances than about those of the Elizabethans. Preconceptions about how Shylock should be treated come from several sources: our own experience and belief; our reading about the play; our culture's acceptance of religious pluralism and rejection of the horrors of the Holocaust. Most of what we know invites us to extend sympathy to Shylock, so that as Hunter observes, we tend to “push modern reactions to modern anti-Semitism into a past where they do not belong” (66). When reading Shakespeare, we make an effort to subordinate our preconceptions to Elizabethan ones, but while watching Shakespeare, we instinctively react as though “what Shakespeare intended does not matter—what matters is what he did”—whether or not we go on to assert, as Stoll does, that “we have as good a right as Shakespeare to our opinion of Shylock” (331). Because current preconceptions are different from the Elizabethan ones, productions of The Merchant of Venice today are often shaped defensively. Directors have to deal with our assumption or fear that the play is anti-Semitic; accusations of prejudice dog the play because our consciousness, scarred by modern persecution of the Jews, encourages a stubborn tendency to see this Jew as symbolic of all Jews.

A major reason playgoers persist in seeing The Merchant of Venice primarily in terms of Jew against Christian, or, more precisely, of Christians against the Jew, is that Shylock encourages others to regard him as the victim of religious persecution (Grebanier 179). Our sense of his being persecuted because of his faith comes partly from historical fact, partly from the way he manipulates our perception of the cause of mistreatment, and partly from our preconceptions, which lead us to undervalue the second of the two reasons, religious and economic, he gives for his seeking revenge. To the Elizabethans it mattered little whether Shakespeare presents the Jew as villainous because he is a usurer or villainous because he is a Jew. To us it matters a great deal. Since we assume that interest will be asked when money is lent and we take commercial competitiveness (but not ethical values) for granted, we pay more attention to the religious motive Shylock stresses to the Christians than to the economic motive he stresses to his fellow Jews—which the text actually emphasizes, both in number of lines and in number of characters recognizing this motivation.

This tendency to separate economic motivation, that does not catch our attention or disturb us, from religious motivation, that does, leads many playgoers to hear in Shylock's “Hath not a Jew eyes?” a plea by one man on behalf of his race, without recognizing how the moneylender shifts the ground of offense to justify his personal desire for revenge. Willy-nilly, the modern audience throws on Shylock the burden of epitomizing a long-suffering people. Shylock invites us to respond this way by adopting in the presence of Christians the attitude of Persecuted Jew. That he has been mistreated by the Christians is made clear early in the play—Antonio, who has spat upon Shylock's Jewish gaberdine, declares he may do so again—yet it is also made clear that Antonio scorns Shylock not because Shylock is an enemy of Christ but because Shylock is a usurer. Our preconceptions keep us from noting that when no Christian is around, Shylock acts like a human being who just happens to be a Jew; he no longer acts the victim of anti-Semitism.

This inability to see Shylock simply as an individual causes a disquieting clash between our preconceptions about Shakespeare and our preconceptions about Jews. None of us likes to think that our Shakespeare, Shakespeare of the comprehensive humanity, could be prejudiced. Yet Shylock's inviting us to regard him as scorned simply because he is a Jew strikes a sensitive spot in playgoers haunted by memories of the Holocaust. Understandably supersensitive, playgoers may perceive an unflattering presentation of this particular Jew as an unflattering representation of all Jews and mistreatment of the Jew by other characters as mistreatment by the playwright. To view IV.i as primarily the destroying of Shylock and only incidentally the rescuing of Antonio is to see what happens through Shylock's eyes. We need to remember that Shakespeare is neither Gratiano nor Shylock. Shakespeare, innocent of modern history and not responsible for our preconceptions, gives us a Jew who is persecutor as well as persecuted and who under pressure chooses to give up his religion rather than his money. If the audience could see Shylock as a human being who is also a Jew, rather than as the Jew, those who put on the play would be freer to find Shylock's rightful place in the delicate balance of the drama.

Long before the Holocaust, in 1911, Stoll declared that “on the popular stage … Shylock must be played pretty much as Irving played him,” that is, as a tragic figure, “though this is not Shakespeare's Shylock” (334). Only five years ago the New York Times reported that “many Shakespearean scholars and Jewish critics agree that it is not so much the play itself as how it is played that really matters” (Kakutani 30), presumably because performance can vindicate their preconception of Shakespeare as too large of soul and sympathy to have written an anti-Semitic play. What keeps The Merchant of Venice onstage today seems to be less its greatness than the challenge of presenting it in ways that diminish in performance what can be perceived as bias in the text.

There are a number of strategies for making our sympathy for Shylock seem evoked by Shakespeare. Interpretive cutting can refocus the play. In the nineteenth century the last act was frequently omitted, so the play in effect ended with the exit of Shylock, broken. Jonathan Miller's 1970 production at the National Theatre, which starred Laurence Olivier as Shylock, made the Jew almost a tragic hero by changing the primary motive for his vengefulness. This was accomplished by eliminating the explanations Shakespeare gives him in I.iii.39-42,

I hate him for he is a Christian,
But more, for that in low simplicity
He lends out money gratis, and brings down
The rate of usance here with us in Venice,

and in III.i.119-21: “I will have the heart of him, if he forfeit; for, were he out of Venice, I can make what merchandise I will.” Without these lines Shylock becomes more sympathetic; it appears that he seeks Antonio's heart not because the merchant has undercut his business but because his own heart, his daughter Jessica, has been stolen from him by one of Antonio's set. For those who saw the National Theatre production without a fresh memory of the play, the loving Shylock created by interpretive cutting was Shakespeare's Shylock.

Playing against the text as well as playing with the text reshapes our sense of Shakespeare's Shylock. For example, in the version of this production televised in 1974, III.i is carefully shaped to create sympathy through sentimental vignettes of a Jew more sinned against than sinning. Shylock, hearing of the ring traded for a monkey, stoops over his wife's picture and kisses it, sobbing. Opening a desk drawer, he takes out a prayer shawl, kisses it and puts it on, covers his eyes, then lifts them to heaven. The words that accompany these actions, “I will have the heart of him,” are overpowered by the striking visual images insisting that Shylock is a devout man driven to hate by the loss of a loved one. We are invited to pity the prayer-shawled figure rocking back and forth in speechless grief without reflecting upon the words just uttered. We easily forget what we hear, that Shylock meets Tubal at the synagogue not to worship but to plan the legal butchering of a human being. We recall instead what we see, Shylock the loving father, the devoted husband, the devout man (Perret 150). Shylock is unquestionably the focus of sympathy in this production.

Yet another strategy for avoiding any appearance of modern anti-Semitism, blackening the Christians rather than whitewashing the Jew, is used by Miller in his 1981 BBC production. As he points out in his introduction for television, “The Christians are shown to be just as merciless and heartless as the unjust Shylock.” The audience is forced to recognize that the inclination to torture knows no religious boundaries by the presentation of III.i, where the Christians cruelly make sport of a Jew whom they accuse of cruelty, and IV.i, where a Jew torments a Christian by insisting on the letter of the law, then is tormented by another Christian in the same way. To see Solanio lunge mockingly at Shylock's genitals when the Jew complains of the “rebellion” of his “flesh,” then Salerio lock his arm around Shylock's neck, choking off protest, is to be shocked into feeling for the Jew's vulnerable humanity. To see Portia standing behind Shylock, her hand holding his on the knife, insisting as he had insisted that he take his pound of flesh, is to be shocked into thinking about the Christian's inhumanity.

The approach of favoring neither Christian nor Jew calls attention to rather than mutilates what is in the text. While the insistent emphasis on flaws can make the characters and their world so unattractive that the comedy loses any sense of joy and light, as did the 1973 Rabb production (Novick 1, 5), the 1981 BBC production shows that such heaviness is not necessary. That we have, in general, come but a little distance from the Elizabethan expectation that performance should indulge preconceptions is suggested by the kind of objections I have heard made to the BBC production. Some felt the Jew should have been presented more positively, given more dignity; none felt the Christians should have been presented less negatively. The time is yet to come when performances of The Merchant of Venice, shaped without reference to the audience's preconceptions about Jews, can fully realize the text's painful richness.

Works Consulted

Baldwin, Thomas Whitfield. The Organization and Personnel of the Shakespearean Company. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1927.

Chambers, E. K. William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1930.

Danson, Laurence. The Harmonies or “The Merchant of Venice.” New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1978.

Echeruo, Michael J. C. “Shylock and the ‘Conditioned Imagination’: A Reinterpretation.” Shakespeare Quarterly 22 (1971): 3-15.

Furness, Horace Howard, ed. The Merchant of Venice. A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare. 13th. ed. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1888.

Hunter, G. K. Dramatic Identities and Cultural Tradition: Studies in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1978.

Grebanier, Bernard. The Truth about Shylock. New York: Random House, 1962.

Kakutani, Michiko. “Debate Over Shylock Simmers Once Again.” New York Times, 22 Feb. 1981, pt. 2: 1, 30.

Lelyveld, Toby B. Shylock on the Stage. Cleveland: Western Reserve Press, 1960.

Miller, Jonathan. “Shakespeare and the Modern Director.” In William Shakespeare: His World, His Work, His Influence. Ed. John F. Andrews. 3 vols. New York: Scribners, 1985. 815-22.

Novick, Julius. New York Times, 11 March 1973, pt. 2: 1, 5.

Perret, Marion D. “Shakespeare and Anti-Semitism: Two Television Versions of The Merchant of Venice.” Mosaic 16 (1983): 146-63.

Pettet, E. C. “The Merchant of Venice and the Problem of Usury.” Essays and Studies 31 (1946): 19-33.

Roth, Cecil. A History of the Jews in England. 3rd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964.

Shakespeare, William. The Merchant of Venice. The Complete Works of Shakespeare. Ed. David Bevington. 3rd ed. Glenview: Scott, 1980. 260-91.

Stoll, Elmer Edgar. Shakespeare Studies. New York: Ungar, 1942.

Styan, J. L. Shakespeare's Stagecraft. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1967.