SOURCE: Edelman, Charles. “Which Is the Jew that Shakespeare Knew?: Shylock on the Elizabethan Stage.” Shakespeare Survey 52 (1999): 99-106.

[In the following essay, Edelman reconstructs Elizabethan perceptions and expectations of Jewish theatrical characters, offering evidence that Shakespeare's Shylock was more likely a tragic figure than simply a comic villain.]

As John Gross remarks in Shylock: Four Hundred Years in the Life of a Legend, ‘everyone who writes about the stage history of The Merchant of Venice is doomed to quote, sooner or later’, the couplet supposedly spoken by Alexander Pope upon seeing Charles Macklin's portrayal in 1741:

This is the Jew
That Shakespeare drew.(1)

Pope's comment shows that he considered Macklin's hard and bitterly malevolent interpretation to be a welcome corrective to the Shylock of Thomas Doggett and his successors in George Granville's adaptation, The Jew of Venice,² a lurid burlesque of the role that had held the stage since 1701. It also shows a yearning, shared by all students of the play, to reconstruct somehow the first Shylock, about whom there is no reliable contemporary information whatsoever—the actor Thomas Jordan's doggerel description,

His beard was red …
His habit was a Jewish gown,
That would defend all weather;
His chin turned up, his nose hung down,
And both ends met together

dates from 1664, when the theatre was not, contrary to the view of E. E. Stoll, ‘still swayed by the tradition of Alleyn and Burbage’.³

Given that any role is going to be significantly altered from its conception in the dramatist's imagination once it is in the hands of an actor and an audience, this essay is not concerned with the Jew that Shakespeare ‘drew’—that Shylock was forever lost the moment the play was performed. My topic is the Jew that Shakespeare ‘knew’, the Shylock whom he, Francis Meres, and other spectators saw some time before September of 1598, when the role was reinvented by Richard Burbage or another actor of the ‘Lord Chamberlaine his Servants’.⁴

In all that has been written about The Merchant of Venice, one point has remained virtually constant: however sympathetic the portrayals of Edmund Kean, Henry Irving, Laurence Olivier, or any number of others may have been, the original Shylock would have conformed to the so-called Elizabethan stereotype of the villainous stage Jew. Gross writes

… to an Elizabethan audience, the fiery red wig that he almost certainly wore spelled out his ancestry even more insistently than anything that was actually said. It was the same kind of wig that had been worn by Marlowe's Barabas, and before that by both Judas and Satan in the old mystery plays.⁵

Similarly, Jay L. Halio, in the introduction to his Oxford edition, notes that ‘Shakespeare's initial conception of him was essentially a comic villain, most likely adorned with a red wig and bottle nose.’ Halio is at pains to point out, however, that ‘the evidence for Shylock as a comic villain’ is not to be found in the play, but ‘partly in the literary and dramatic traditions which Shakespeare followed, that lie behind the character, and partly in certain generic and other considerations’.⁶ He then provides a lucid account of the qualities held in common by such fictional Jews as Zadoch and Zachary in Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller, and Abraham, the Jewish poisoner in Greene's Selimus (both 1594), these three characters probably having been influenced by the notoriety of Dr Roderigo Lopez, tried and executed in the same year, and above all by the popularity of Marlowe's extraordinary creation, Barabas, first seen c. 1589.

As cogent as the views of Gross and Halio are, there is a troubling premise behind them: a portrayal possible in 1814, when Kean stunned Drury Lane, and obviously possible, even obligatory nowadays, could not have been done four hundred years ago; one would be hard pressed to think of any other Shakespearian character who is thought to have changed so completely as to be unrecognizable from Elizabethan to modern performance. In questioning this premise, I am not arguing for a ‘tragic’ Shylock as the correct one, or arguing that the play is pro- or anti-Semitic; my sole object is to challenge the a priori assumption that Shylock must have conformed to a particular theatrical tradition, or that he must have been played in a certain way to satisfy the expectations of that wonderfully malleable group, who always think and believe whatever we want them to, Shakespeare's audience.

Assuming that the text remains the same (a point I will take up later), what are the variables that might separate the 1590s Merchant from those of the nineteenth century onwards? They might be divided into three categories: (1) limitations imposed by literary or theatrical tradition; (2) limitations imposed by audience beliefs, attitudes, or expectations; and (3) theatrical limitations imposed upon the range of performance options by acting style, costume, the shape of the stage, or any of the many other historically discrete theatrical conventions and technical considerations associated with Elizabethan performance practice.

Earlier I referred to the ‘so-called’ stereotype of the Elizabethan stage Jew, for it is far from certain that there ever was such a thing. When considering Jews in the early modern drama, we are struck first by how few of them there are, and then by how different these few are from each other. In the twelve years leading up to The Merchant of Venice, there are exactly three Jews in extant plays: one of them is a tiny part, the aforementioned Abraham in Greene's Selimus. The others are, of course, Barabas in The Jew of Malta, and Gerontus in Wilson's Three Ladies of London (1584).

Barabas' villainous attributes are too well known to require description here, but Gerontus is by far the most honest and admirable, one might even say ‘Christian’, character in his play. E. E. Stoll, in his oft-cited argument for the ‘traditional’ Shylock, summarily dismisses Gerontus as ‘the single instance in the Elizabethan drama of an honourable Jew’,⁷ which is easy for Stoll to do since he has already established that ‘to get at Shakespeare's intention (after a fashion) is, after all, not hard’, and that ‘Shakespeare, more than any other poet, reflected the settled prejudices and passions of his race’.⁸ But whatever Stoll may think about Three Ladies of London, Gerontus shows that single instance or not, even if there was a stereotypical stage Jew, the Elizabethan theatre was capable of accommodating alternative portrayals.

This leads us away from Jews on the stage and in literature to the far more controversial topic of how Jews were seen in Elizabethan England. Is it true, as James C. Bulman writes in his valuable contribution to the Shakespeare in Performance series, that ‘some knowledge of the history of anti-Semitism in England is critical to an understanding of the stereotype with which Shakespeare appealed to his audience's prejudices’?⁹ Here I am indebted to Laurence Lerner, who in his essay ‘Wilhelm S and Shylock’,¹⁰ suggests in a most engaging way that the perceived anti-Semitism of the play could be more a product of audience appropriation than anything in the text itself. Had the Elizabethans, all of whom were predisposed to think of Jews as devils and ritual murderers, read enough Terence Hawkes to know that the meaning of the play resided not in the author or actors, but entirely in themselves?

If they had, then it is not hard, as so many have done, to construct a picture of the first Shylock as the archetypical villain, for it is all too true that along with the execution of Dr Lopez (although it should be noted that Lopez's religion was hardly mentioned at his trial),¹¹ there was pamphlet after pamphlet, sermon after sermon, and story after story, from Chaucer's Prioress' Tale to Nashe's Unfortunate Traveller, encouraging people to see Jews in the worst possible light. If that is the picture we want, though, we have again gone outside The Merchant of Venice to see it, since, as Gross reminds us, however ubiquitous stories about Hugh of Lincoln and well-poisoners might have been, none of the traditional charges are alluded to in the play: nothing about Christ-killers, sorcerers, ritual murderers, crucifiers of children, or host-desecrators.¹²

This brings me to one of the central points of my argument: that it is simply not true that everyone in Elizabethan England, and hence everyone on the stage and in the audience at The Merchant of Venice, was an anti-Semite. As James Shapiro shows in Shakespeare and the Jews, by the late 1590s a significant number of Jews lived in or visited England, exactly how many depending on how one defined the group. Many were, of course, Marranos, Jews who had to some degree converted to Christianity, including Lopez, and there were others who were considered at least in some respects to have retained their Jewish identity, such as the descendants of the Jewish musicians brought to England from Italy by Henry VIII.¹³ There were also the many contacts that merchants, ambassadors, and other English travellers had with Jews—Laurence Aldersey's description of a service he attended at the Venice synagogue in 1581 is one of total respect:

For my further knowledge of these people, I went into their Sinagogue upon a Saturday, which is their Sabbath day: and I found them in their service or prayers, very devoute: they receive the five bookes of Moses, and honour them by carying them about their Church, as the Papists doe their crosse. Their Synagogue is in forme round, and the people sit round about it, and in the midst, there is a place for him that readeth to the rest: as for their apparell, all of them weare a large white lawne over their garments, which reacheth from their head, downe to the ground, The Psalmes they sing as we doe, having no image, nor using any maner of idolatrie: their error is, that they beleeve not in Christ, nor yet receive the New Testament.¹⁴

Documents such as this one encourage us to conclude that no matter how pervasive anti-Semitic literature may have been, the idea that a universal ‘Elizabethan horror of Jews’ must have informed the reception of The Merchant of Venice is simply one more Tudor myth, similar not only to the supposed Elizabethan horror of rebellion said to have dictated the reception of the history plays, but also, as I will argue, to the equally mythical Elizabethan horror of usury.

Virtually everything, and worse, that was said about Jews in Elizabethan England was said about Moslems, and yet throughout her reign Elizabeth was busy establishing trade relations with whoever would deal with her, from Morocco to Constantinople, buying saltpetre for gunpowder from the Emperor of Morocco and selling him munitions in return, munitions that were used to annihilate the Portuguese and their fellow Christians at the Battle of Alcazar.¹⁵ And, as most editions of Othello point out, in 1600 she received an embassy of sixteen Moors, the portrait of their leader now hanging in the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon.

How could this have been possible if Islam was, in the words of the Reverend Joseph Hall, ‘a rude ignorance and a palpable imposture … their laws, full of license, full of impiety: in which revenge is encouraged, multitudes of wives allowed, theft tolerated … a monster of many seeds, and all accursed’?¹⁶ Whatever one's private feelings might be, the history of international commerce shows that overt prejudice flies out of the window when there is money to be made.

But what if there is money to be lost? If Shylock's religion, in itself, is not enough to give him automatically the attributes of a Herod or a Barabas, there is still the matter of Shylock as usurer to be considered. Even if most, or at least some, Elizabethans did not in fact feel all that strongly about Jews, perhaps they all, along with Philip Stubbes, thought that ‘he that killeth a man, riddeth him out of his paines at once, but he that taketh usury is long in butchering his pacient, suffering him by little and little to anguish, and sucking out his hart blood … an Usurer is worse than a Jew, for they to this daye, will not take any usurie of their Brethren, according to the lawe of God’.¹⁷

Stubbes has done us a favour by distinguishing between Christian and Jewish usurers, since there are actually very few Jews amongst the many usurers in early modern drama. As Garry Wills has noted,

some who discuss this play believe that only Shylock and his coreligionists are the usurers in Venice. There would be no reason for Elizabethans, so familiar with their own Christian usurers, to assume that. In fact, the usurer, a common figure in the drama of Shakespeare's age, is normally a Christian.¹⁸

Still, Lawrence Danson writes of ‘the Elizabethan horror of the idea of taking interest for the loan of money’, going on to say that writers, ‘depending for their view of economics upon the most venerable of classical and medieval sources, were unanimous in their condemnation of the practice of usury’.¹⁹

This might be true, but whether or not Shylock is, in fact, a usurer requires far more careful interrogation than has so far been given to the point. The word ‘usury’ does not occur in The Merchant of Venice, while ‘usance’ is heard three times: Shylock hates Antonio most of all for bringing down the ‘rate of usance’ (1.3.43) in Venice, and for having ‘rated’ him for his ‘moneys and [his] usances’ (1.3.106). In the third and last use of the word, Shylock is prepared to take

                    … no doit
Of usance

(1.3.138-9)

for his loan to Antonio. The only person to use the word ‘usurer’ is, by report, Antonio:

He was wont to call me usurer: let him look to his bond. He was wont to lend money for a Christian courtesy: let him look to his bond.

(3.1.43-6)

To Shylock, then, ‘usance’ is a straightforward synonym for ‘interest’, which Shylock freely admits he takes—Shakespeare's choice of one term or the other in each case could be purely for metrical reasons. ‘Usury’, however, is an epithet delivered by the same man who called Shylock ‘misbeliever’ and ‘cut-throat, dog’ (1.3.110), after he spat on him, and openly states his willingness to do the same again (1.3.128-9).

The way Shakespeare employs the words ‘usance’ and ‘usurer’ in The Merchant of Venice epitomizes what was a major public debate of Elizabethan England, for although Elizabethan writers were, as Danson says, ‘unanimous in their condemnation of the practice of usury’²⁰ they were anything but unanimous in defining it. As Norman Jones writes in his endlessly fascinating book, God and the Moneylenders, ‘all good Christians agreed that usury was wrong, but they could not agree on what it was and when it occurred’.²¹

Until 1545, any charging of interest was considered usury, and hence illegal, with the obvious effect of keeping interest rates extremely high. In response, Henry VIII's 1545 statute defined the offence as interest in excess of 10 per cent, although most loans were for periods much shorter than a year, so the nominal annual interest was actually far higher. Enforcement proved very difficult, however, and rates remained high, so the lawmakers did what they always do when they cannot regulate something—they outlaw it again. In 1552 Henry VIII's statute was repealed and replaced by total prohibition, with the same effect as that other well-known prohibition, so in 1571, a year after one John Shakespeare of Stratford was fined 40 shillings for charging an astonishing £20 interest for a one-month £80 loan,²² Elizabeth's parliament, after extensive debate, restored the legal limit at 10٪, whatever the term of the loan was. (If there was a New York Daily News in those days, it would have reported that ‘Johnny Gloves’ was busted for nailing his customers on a ‘vig’ of six points a week.)²³

In reading God and the Moneylenders and Laura Caroline Stevenson's Praise and Paradox: Merchants and Craftsmen in Elizabethan Popular Literature, one learns that writers such as Miles Mosse, who saw usury as the charging of any interest, rather than excessive interest, were what we would call today the extreme right wing, or even a ‘lunatic fringe’.²⁴ Still, interest rates, like taxes, are always too high, so we might easily assume that many in Shakespeare's audience would have known the difficulty of repaying a loan, and would have seen Shylock as a usurer. But for every borrower there is a lender, and there were no banks or credit unions then—ordinary people who needed money borrowed from a neighbour or acquaintance, or found an acquaintance to act as broker to negotiate the loan with someone else. Given the diverse social makeup of the Elizabethan theatre-going public, it is quite probable that some in the audience, since they were engaged in the practice themselves, believed that lending money at the going market rate, or receiving a commission for arranging a loan, was a socially useful and even honourable thing to do. One member of the original audience at The Merchant of Venice would surely have thought so, presuming he was not acting a part on stage—the play's author.

It has been established beyond doubt that like his father, William Shakespeare loaned out, at interest, what were sizable sums of money, and he was prepared to sue when he was not paid back. He also, as the Quiney correspondence shows, acted as a broker on occasion, arranging loans of what would be, as E. A. J. Honigmann notes, ‘five-figure’ sums today.²⁵ When Antonio says

Shylock, albeit I neither lend nor borrow
By taking nor by giving of excess

(1.3.59-60)

would not the play's author have expected, even wanted, at least someone in the audience, in those very inflationary times, to ask what Antonio was doing with a shirt on his back?

It is ironic that Stubbes is so often cited as speaking on behalf of the Elizabethans and their horror of charging interest, since his eleven pages on the evils of interest are closely followed by ten pages on the evils of plays and playing, a reminder that moral tracts tell us far more about what audience preconceptions were not, rather than what they were. If we are looking for books to tell us about prevailing social values of early modern England, we might consult those containing tables of interest rates, freely available by the early 1600s, rather than The Anatomy of Abuses or The Arraignment and Conviction of Usurie.²⁶

My last category, theatrical limitations imposed upon the range of performance options, requires discussion of another argument that has been offered for the traditionally villainous Shylock—perhaps the most potent argument in that it relies, to a degree, on the text itself rather than things external to it. I refer to Shylock's famous ‘aside’, labelled as such in every modern edition of the play I have seen:

How like a fawning publican he looks.
I hate him for he is a Christian …

(1.3.39-40)

In Understanding Shakespeare's Plays in Performance, Halio writes that

omission of this passage is usually a clear indication of how the director has conceived Shylock's role—and with it, much else in the play. The script is then tailored accordingly, so that Shylock can emerge, as in Henry Irving's famous portrayal, as a tragic hero.²⁷

Specifically referring to both Olivier and Irving, he adds that cutting this speech ‘is of course essential for this interpretation’.²⁸

Unfortunately, neither Irving, nor Kean, nor Booth, cut a single word of the speech—indeed it was the centrepiece of Irving's portrayal, as described by his grandson:

His anger grew keener and more savage at the beginning of the aside, ‘How like a fawning publican he looks …’ For a moment he recovered his self-control, and then, on the words, ‘If I can catch him …’ his spleen once more got the better of him.²⁹

How did these great ‘tragic’ Shylocks leave the ‘aside’ intact, and still manage to stun audiences with their sympathetic portrayals? The answer, I believe, is that the speech is not an ‘aside’ at all, as the word is usually defined by editors and critics. As is well known, the first quarto of The Jew of Malta shows many asides, labelled as such, for Barabas, but this stage direction is used indiscriminately for what are actually two separate conventions.³⁰ When Barabas is feigning distress over Abigail's entry into the convent, the asides are secret ‘whispers to her’:

Wilt thou forsake mee too in my distresse,
Seduced Daughter, Goe forget [not].
                                                                                                    aside to her.
Becomes it Jewes to be so credulous,
To morrow early Il'e be at the doore.
                                                                                                    aside to her.
No come not at me, if thou wilt be damn'd,
Forget me, see me not, and so be gone.
Farewell, Remember to morrow morning.
                                                                                                    aside.

(d1^r, lines 18-19, 28-32)

Other asides, however, invite Barabas to speak directly to the audience, conspiring with them, as it were, with a series of ‘one-liners’ (in both senses of the term) such as:

I, like enough, why then let every man
Provide him, and be there for fashion-sake.
If any thing shall there concerne our state
Assure your selves I'le looke unto my selfe. aside

(B4^r lines 6-9)

and

I must make this villaine away: please you dine
With me, Sir, & you shal be most hartily poyson'd. aside

(H3r lines 28-9)

Must Shylock imitate Barabas and speak directly to the audience in his twelve-line speech? Can he not, in what we would call a soliloquy if he were alone, think aloud to himself? The one-word stage direction ‘aside’ appears exactly once in the Folio, in Titus Andronicus, when Tamora addresses Titus in her imagination while musing,

Why thus it shall become
High witted Tamora to glose with all: aside
But Titus, I haue touch'd thee to the quicke,
Thy life blood out: If Aaron now be wise,
Then is all safe, the Anchor's in the Port.

(tln 2027-31)

There are only two such directions in the various Quartos, both within one speech in Pericles qi, as Simonides addresses Thaisa, the first ‘aside’ sitting one line below where it should be:

Yea, Mistris, are you so peremptorie?
I am glad on't with all my heart,
Ile tame you; Ile bring you in subjection. Aside.
Will you not, having my consent,
Bestowe your love and your affections,
Upon a Stranger? who for ought I know
May be (nor can I thinke the contrary)
As great in blood as I my selfe: Aside.

(D4^v, lines 2-9)

As in Titus, the context implies thinking aloud rather than addressing the audience.³¹

While the very word ‘soliloquy’ indicates that only the speaker is on stage, there are countless examples in Shakespeare, unmarked by any stage direction, of this other convention for which we have no convenient label—thinking aloud while others are present. It is hard to imagine any Claudius saying

How smart a lash that speech doth give my conscience.
The harlot's cheek, beautied with plast'ring art,
Is not more ugly to the thing that helps it
Than is my deed to my most painted word.
O heavy burden!

(3.1.52-6)

directly to the audience.

It is all too easy to confuse Shylock with the great Elizabethan villains such as Barabas, Richard III, and Iago by assuming that in the theatre, he, as they almost certainly did, spoke directly to the spectators. While such generalizations about performance practice are admittedly dangerous, I would suggest that one major limitation of the proscenium arch theatre is that the long aside is most difficult to manage. Further to this point, in the nineteenth century direct address to the audience would have carried with it strong associations of that nineteenth-century descendant of Barabas, the stock villain—‘curses! foiled again!’—of the melodrama.

For Kean, Booth, or Irving to turn to the audience and secretly whisper his hatred while Bassanio and Antonio sit there feigning conversation would have been most inimical to a sympathetic portrayal, so they changed the aside into a soliloquy by having Bassanio leave the stage before ‘How like a fawning publican’ was spoken.³² This, however, would not have been necessary in the far larger, more flexible, and multi-dimensional space of the Shakespearian theatre, where thinking aloud in a serious mode, at some length, while others are on stage, was common.

If Kean, or indeed Olivier, had played Shylock at the Globe, he would have been able, as the Folio text indicates, to have Antonio and Bassanio on stage while he spoke ‘How like a fawning publican he looks …’ without automatic association of villainy. Indeed, the lines denied Olivier at the National could easily have been restored for the television production through the simple device of the voice-over, television's equivalent of this Elizabethan theatrical convention. ‘Fawning publican’ and all, he might still have been, as I believe Kean might have been, very much like ‘the Jew that Shakespeare knew’.

Notes

1. John Gross, Shylock: Four Hundred Years in the Life of a Legend (New York, 1994), p. 105.

2. Gross, Shylock, 91-105; John Russell Brown, introd., The Merchant of Venice (London, 1955), pp. xxxii-xxxiii; M. M. Mahood, introd., The Merchant of Venice (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 42-3; Jay L. Halio, introd., The Merchant of Venice (Oxford, 1993), pp. 61-5.

3. Jordan's poem and Stoll's comment in E. E. Stoll, Shakespeare Studies (New York, 1942), p. 255.

4. Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia (entered 7 September 1598), in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston, 1974), p. 1844; the title page of q1 (1600) claims that the play is printed ‘as it hath been divers times acted by the Lord Chamberlaine his Servants’.

5. Gross, Shylock, pp. 16-17.

6. Halio, Merchant of Venice, p. 10.

7. Stoll, Shakespeare Studies, p. 273.

8. Ibid., p. 262, 280.

9. James C. Bulman, Shakespeare in Performance: The Merchant of Venice (Manchester, 1991), p. 18.

10. Laurence Lerner, ‘Wilhelm S and Shylock’, Shakespeare Survey 48 (1995), 61-8; p. 64.

11. Peter Berek, ‘The Jew as Renaissance Man’, Renaissance Quarterly, 51 (1998), 128-62; p. 151.

12. Gross, Shylock, p. 17.

13. James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York, Columbia University Press, 1996), pp. 55-88; Roger Prior, ‘A second Jewish Community in Tudor London’, Jewish Historical Studies 31 (1990), 137-52; see also Gross, Shylock, p. 23; Berek, ‘The Jew’, pp. 131-6.

14. ‘The first voyage or journey, made by Master Laurence Aldersey, Marchant of London, to the Cities of Jerusalem, and Tripolis, &c. In the yeere 1581. Penned and set downe by himself’, in Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of the English Nation, vol. 5 (Glasgow, 1903), pp. 204-5. Brown (pp. xxxvii-xxxviii) discounts anti-Semitism as a large part of the Elizabethans’ day to day lives.

15. ‘The Amassage of M. Edmund Hogan, one of the sworne Esquires of her Majesties person, from her Highnesse to Mully Abdelmelech Emperour of Marocco, and king of Fes and Sus: on the yeere 1577, written by himselfe’, in Hakluyt, vol. 6, pp. 285-93; Eldred D. Jones, The Elizabethan Image of Africa (Washington, 1971), p. 35.

16. Samuel C. Chew, The Crescent and the Rose (New York, Oxford University Press, 1937), p. 445.

17. Philip Stubbes, Anatomy of Abuses (London, 1583), sig. k7^r, k8^v.

18. Garry Wills, ‘Shylock Without Usury’, New York Review of Books, 18 January 1990, 22-5; p. 24, citing A. B. Stonex, ‘The Usurer in Elizabethan Drama’, PMLA, 31 (1919), 190-210; p. 191.

19. Lawrence Danson, ‘The Problem of Shylock’, in Harold Bloom, ed., Major Literary Characters: Shylock (New York, 1991), p. 273.

20. Danson, ‘The problem of Shylock’, p. 273.

21. Norman Jones, God and the Moneylenders (London, 1989), p. 24.

22. S. Schoenbaum, Shakespeare's Lives, new edn. (Oxford, 1991), 562-3; E. A. J. Honigmann, ‘“There is a World Elsewhere”, William Shakespeare, Businessman’, in Images of Shakespeare: Proceedings of the Third Congress of the International Shakespeare Association, 1986, ed. Werner Habicht, D. J. Palmer, Roger Pringle (Newark, 1986), p. 40; see also D. L. Thomas and N. E. Evans, ‘John Shakespeare in The Exchequer’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 35 (1984), 314-18.

23. According to the Wall Street Journal, as cited in The New Dictionary of American Slang, ed. Robert L. Chapman (London, 1986), ‘vig’ or ‘vigorish’—the extortionate interest charged by criminal loan sharks—would be about 180 per cent per year, or 15 per cent per month. John Shakespeare charged double that.

24. Laura Caroline Stevenson, Praise and Paradox: Merchants and Craftsmen in Elizabethan Popular Literature (Cambridge, 1984). Mosse's Arraignment and Conviction of Usurie, 1595, receives ample discussion in N. Jones, pp. 144 ff.

25. Honigmann, ‘World Elsewhere’, pp. 41-5; see also his Shakespeare's Impact on his Contemporaries (London, 1982), pp. 8-14.

26. N. Jones, God and the Moneylenders, p. 78.

27. Halio, Understanding Shakespeare's Plays in Performance (Manchester, 1988), p. 12.

28. Halio, Merchant of Venice, p. 10.

29. Lawrence Irving, Henry Irving: the Actor and his World, by his Grandson, Lawrence Irving (London, 1951), p. 40.

30. On the aside, see Alan Dessen, Recovering Shakespeare's Theatrical Vocabulary (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 51 ff.

31. There is also an ‘aside’ in the ‘bad’ Quarto of Merry Wives of Windsor—see Dessen, Recovering Shakespeare's Theatrical Vocabulary, p. 51.

32. Mahood, introd., Merchant of Venice, p. 44.