[In the following essay, Echeruo compares Shakespeare's characterization of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice with Marlowe's rendering of Barabas in The Jew of Malta, examining the relationship of both to stereotypes of Jews.]

Irving Ribner's recent comparison of Marlowe's Barabas and Shakespeare's Shylock¹ suggests that the finer conclusions to be drawn from any such comparison need to be restated and made quite explicit. It is true, as Prof. Ribner says, that when comparisons are made between The Merchant of Venice and The Jew of Malta—“and it is perhaps inevitable that they should be—it is usually with the assumption that Shakespeare imitated Marlowe. … To some we have Shakespeare palliating the antisemitism of Marlowe with a more sympathetic portrait of a Jew; to others we have Shakespeare striving to outdo Marlowe in antisemitism by presenting a more sympathetic view of the Christian world than Marlowe's.” Ribner's view is that the “proposition” that The Jew of Malta “exerted much influence” upon The Merchant of Venice is “questionable” and “can be positively neither denied nor affirmed”. He feels, also, that the propositions that Shylock “owes much to Barabas”, and that “Shakespeare is indebted to Marlowe for ‘much of the atmosphere of his Jewish theme’” are “dubious propositions at best.” If these two plays are to be compared, he concludes, “it must not be for what we learn about the influence of one dramatist upon the other, but for the insight such comparison may afford into the vast gulf which divides the two major Elizabethan dramatists” (p. 45).

But surely the gulf is not that vast, and the aim of such comparisons should not merely be to defeat the argument for Marlowe's influence on Shakespeare but to appreciate the (perhaps independent) effect of an antecedent tradition on two contemporary dramatists, to lead us to an awareness of the scope of that tradition and, finally, to enable us to understand whatever else each of them may have wanted to do with or to that tradition. In which case the specific influence of Marlowe (or of Il Pecorone) on Shakespeare is not really that crucial to the understanding of any parallel situations in Shakespeare and Marlowe. More specifically, even if they do not establish an influence, the parallels in plot and emphasis between their two plays would at least suggest that certain plot-situations and emphases were quite susceptible in Elizabethan times to the specific treatment accorded them by the two major dramatists.

Even then, another issue needs to be resolved. It is the problem of the Jew as stereotype and the place it has in the criticism of Elizabethan drama. The problem arises whenever we try to understand a comment such as Duthie's—that “in the Il Pecorone story the Jew is a conventional figure. Shakespeare vitalizes the character.”² The point is that Ser Giovanni's story is not about a Jew as such, but about the many trials of Giannetto. The story devotes very little time, anyway, to the Jew and could therefore not be expected to give the same ample illustration of the Jew's personality as Shakespeare does. Moreover, Ser Giovanni manages to give us the background of Venetian law against which to see the Jew's otherwise incredible obstinacy. “The question [of the Jew's demands] was much debated, and every one said that the Jew was in the wrong, but since Venice had a reputation as a place of strict justice, and the Jew's case was legal and formally made out, nobody dared to deny him, but only to plead with him.”³ Hence, in keeping with this tradition of strict justice, the Jew, on his defeat, is not even allowed the ten thousand ducats he was now willing to accept: “‘If you want your pound of flesh, take it. If not, I shall declare your bond null and void.’ … Everyone present was delighted and they all mocked at the Jew, saying, ‘He who lays snares for others is caught himself.’ The Jew, seeing that he could not do what he had wished, took his bond and tore it in pieces in a rage” (p. 474). This is the Jew of Il Pecorone. What we are at a loss to know is how this Jew is “conventional” whereas Shakespeare's is not.

Perhaps this question is related to another. Prof. Ribner has drawn our attention to two opposed statements by C. J. Sisson and H. B. Charlton. “The Jews in London”, Sisson declared, “had the immense comfort of communal life, undisturbed, with full freedom to carry on their trades and professions, and even the further solace of the regular practice of religious rites in the home, even if in secret. The Jewish problem was, in truth, no problem in the reign of Elizabeth.”⁴ That is to say, The Merchant of Venice has nothing to do with the Jewish question. Charlton, for his part, claims that “about 1594, public sentiment in England was roused to an outbreak of traditional Jew-baiting; and for good and evil, Shakespeare the man was like his fellows. He planned a Merchant of Venice to let the Jew dog have it, and thereby to gratify his own patriotic pride of race.”⁵ In other words, the play is Shakespeare's contribution to the contemporary anti-Semitism movement. Both declarations are quite relevant to the problem in hand—namely the attempt to reconstruct the forces acting on the audience and the dramatist in their appreciation of the play. But the thing to seek is not the local or topical momentum that gave immediacy to the plays but, possibly, the latent folk memory which could be induced by a dramatist to a suspension of its own belief or disbelief in Jewish cruelty and blasphemy.

When we fail to take this folk or archetypal conditioning into account, we become liable to possibly sentimental readings of The Merchant of Venice. We are likely then to resort to the kind of over-statement we find in Prof. Grebanier's study of the play and (now) in Ribner's essay. Shylock, Grebanier says, “is not only a Jew; he is also a prototype of the banker, and what Shakespeare has to say on that head applies equally to Christian, Jew or Moslem.”⁶ Ribner says of Shylock and Jessica that they are “saved by the reality of love”. The “highest reflection in terms of human love of God's divine love for man is the kind of love reflected in … Jessica's readiness to leave her father and his gold for Christian salvation”! These interpretations are misleading. In The Jew of Malta, Marlowe was un-Christian enough (as Ribner points out in another context⁷) to expose the money-minded logic behind the Christian gesture of love through conversion. Prof. Ribner makes very much of this gesture. “The punishment which Shylock at the end receives is his reception into the Christian community. … Shakespeare's Jew comes at last to generate love in spite of himself and in this is some victory” (p. 48). But even a brief consideration of the Proclamation in The Jew of Malta will reveal the base motivation behind some such offers of salvation.

First, the tribute-money of the Turks shall be levied against the Jews, and each of them to pay one-half of his estate.

Secondly, he that denies to pay, shall straight become a Christian.

The third clause of the Proclamation suggests the calculating and cynical wickedness of the entire procedure: “he that denies this, shall absolutely lose all.”⁸ When in The Merchant of Venice IV. i the defeated Shylock “accepts” the conditions imposed upon him by the court—“Send the deed after me, / And I will sign it”—he is recognizing the weight of Christian authority and submitting to it. The process is not a “reception into the Christian community.”

The reference to a “reception into the Christian community” does, in fact, draw our attention to what may be considered the central pattern in Shakespeare's handling of his subject, namely, the Christian-Jew dichotomy. Or more specifically the conflict between Christian Europe and a Jew who was thought to be not only an usurer but also (by definition) a hater of Christ and of Christians.⁹

To understand this conflict, it is necessary to appreciate the fact that from the start European “prejudice” against Jews was Christian and theological rather than racial in origin. The Church did have its early struggles with Judaism, but it was not till the ascendancy of Christianity as a state religion under the Emperor Constantine that the Christians had an opportunity to legislate effectively against Jews and Judaism. The destruction of Jerusalem had scattered the Jews all over the Roman Empire, where they were initially granted some protection. This toleration—of which the Constitution of Caracalla (198-217 a.d.) was an example—was repudiated through Christian pressure in the Theodosian Code. Among other things, this Code designated Jews as “inferiores” and “perversi”, and regarded Judaism as a godless and dangerous sect (“secta nefaria”, “feralis”). It also declared the meetings of Jews “sacrilegi coetus”.¹⁰ Under Canon XV of the Council of Illiberis (305 a.d.), marriages of Christians to Jews, pagans, or heretics were regarded as akin to adultery.¹¹ By a further Edict of 423 a.d., marriages between Jews and Christians were made punishable by death.¹²

It is important that we insist on the religious foundation for this prejudice. Thus, though the Bishop of Caesarea objected to the Jewish rite of circumcision because he considered it a disgrace, he condemned it principally because he thought it was a heresy.¹³ Naturally there was difficulty in distinguishing between the social characteristics which differentiated Jews from Europeans and the doctrinal or ritual ones which separated Jews from Christians. Ephraem Syrus, for example, called the Jews “circumcised vagabonds”, and Ambrose, Bishop of Milan (340-397 a.d.), called the Synagogue in Mesopotamia “a house of depravity in which Christ is daily blasphemed”. Pope Gregory the Great declared the Jewish religion “a superstition, depravity and faithlessness”. And Thomas Aquinas was able to assert that the Jews were “doomed to perpetual servitude and the lords of the earth may use their goods as their own.”¹⁴ The enthusiasm of these Bishops in their hostility to Jews did not come from personal prejudice, but from strong religious attitudes deriving from theological convictions. St. Isidore, for example, believed that the Jews were responsible for their suffering. In his De Fidei Catholica ex veteri et novo Testamento contra Judaeis, he declared that the Jews who killed Christ brought damnation on their posterity: “Judaei posteritatem suam damnaverunt”.¹⁵ St. Isidore depended for his justifying text on Matt. xxvi: 25: “His blood be upon us and upon our children”. He quotes this passage several times through his writings, even linking it with the curse of Noah on Cham. Just as Cham, through his derision of his father's nakedness, had brought about the curse on his children, “sicut et plebs Judaei, quae Dominum crucifixit etiam in filiis poenam damnationis suae transmisit” (LXXXVII, 237). In his Allegoriae Quaedam Sacre Scripturae, he elaborates further on this comparison. Cham, he claims, stands for the Jews, “quo Christum incarnatum atque mortuum derident.” He continues:

Chanaan, filius ejus, qui pro patrio delicto maledictione damnatur (Genes. ix), posteritatem indicat Judaeorum, qui in passione Domini damnationis sententiam exceperunt, clamantibus Judaeis: Sanguis ejus super nos, et super filios nostros.¹⁶

In all his attacks on the Jews, it would thus appear, St. Isidore was motivated by the blasphemy of the Jews on Christ, from which the analogies with the Cham-episode gain considerable force.¹⁷

It is essentially this tradition of the hatred and irreverence of the Jews towards Christ which was carried over through the early Church into the Renaissance. The Jew was thus identified as a reject, as an inveterate hater of Christ and Christians. In medieval drama, the Jew is shown consistently in this role. Though the New Testament made it clear that Christ was scourged and tormented by Roman soldiers,¹⁸ the Play of Corpus Christi (1415) has four Jews accusing Christ, four persecuting him, and others compelling him to bear the cross.¹⁹

Along with this tradition of the Jew as a hater of Christ was another of him as the usurer. This tradition can be traced back to the Biblical stories of the publican and of Christ's cleansing of the Temple. Especially, it was associated with Judas' betrayal of Christ for thirty pieces of silver. The cycle of mystery plays acted at York on Corpus Christi Day during the 14th and 15th centuries gives numerous examples of this. “Judas, like the bargaining usurer, asks for thirty pence saying that he would like to ‘make a merchandise’; he grumbles when the Romans fail to hand the money over at once. He is also described as Christ's Treasurer in which office he had shown his ‘Jewish’ instincts by converting ten percent of the money to his own use, a fact which receives special emphasis in the play.”²⁰ Money-lending for interest was of course considered immoral and unnatural in the old Testament²¹ and even in classical antiquity,²² though, for obvious reasons, many people engaged in it.

The early Church condemned lending at a profit and claimed that the ruling of the Mosaic Law against what was called “usury among brothers” amounted to a universal interdiction against the taking of any interest under any circumstances. St. Ambrose made an allowance for Christians dealing with Jews and Mohammedans, arguing that it was no crime to take interest from a religious enemy: “From him exact usury whom it would be no crime to kill.”²³ By the end of the 12th century, however, Christian money-lenders were so numerous that the Church had to reaffirm its stand. The Second Lateran Council (1139 a.d.) declared the unrepentant usurer condemned by the Old and New Law alike and therefore “unworthy” of “Christian burial”.²⁴ The Quod Super nonnullis bull of 1258 by Pope Alexander IV went so far as to make the taking of interest an act of heresy.²⁵

These restrictions on banking, which many Christians found onerous,²⁶ made the Jews (who were not subject to these laws but were resident within the Christian community)²⁷ the one group of people who could engage in the necessary and lucrative trade without the force of the Inquisition being brought to bear on them.²⁸ The Christians who did engage in the business were regarded as lost souls, as Dante specifically states in the Inferno (Cantos XI and XVII). The result was naturally a despised minority made rich and powerful by the religious decisions of a Christian Europe. Hence, for example, Barabas' boast in The Jew of Malta:

Rather had I, a Jew, to be hated thus,
Than pitied in a Christian poverty.

This boast was, of course, Marlowe's way of projecting into his drama the sentiment which a disgruntled Christian audience would imagine to be most natural to a Jew. As Marlowe makes Barabas assert, the riches of the Jewish merchant “are the blessings promised to the Jews, And herein was old Abraham's happiness.”²⁹

This ambivalent response to Jewish prosperity is also to be found in Shakespeare's play, particularly in Shylock's retelling of the story of Jacob and Laban's sheep in which Shylock claims to be emulating Jacob's practice. Laban's story became well-known especially after the Reformation, when the emphasis on Old Testament stories became general. In the dramatizations of the story, Esau is the villain, Jacob the hero. Shylock appears to be defending his usury by ironically recalling the fact that in medieval plays Jacob's otherwise dishonest scheming was justified and praised.³⁰

Also connected with the tradition of Jewish usury is the Lorenzo-Jessica subplot in the play. The abduction of the Jewish maiden (her father's heir) and the robbery of her father (with or without her connivance) were stock Renaissance exempla.³¹ Shakespeare creates his characters within that tradition.³² In V. i. 14-17 Lorenzo repeats the seduction motif, leaving Antonio to supply the robbery motif by forcing Shylock to endow the couple with half his fortune.³³

When we speak of “stereotypes” in a play such as The Merchant of Venice or The Jew of Malta, we should really be thinking of that complex product of an imagination conditioned by the expectations of its audience, that product of an imagination which may modify or even reject the implications of its characterizations but cannot escape addressing itself to those implications. To such a “conditioned imagination”, the fact that Shylock and Barabas are Jews becomes more important than the fact that they are men. In the sense that they are men, their actions are, of course, capable of being explained by the same reasons as the actions of other people with whom (we might say) the writer is “in resonance”. To the extent, however, that they are “Jews”, they are supposed to have a psychology which allows them the right to modes of behavior for which there would otherwise have been no explanation. These characters, in other words, have a mode of being determined principally by the imaginative expectations and assumptions of the members of the culture in which they are being presented. In the usual representation of motive in literature, the detailed exploration of a character is at the same time an exploration of the psychology of the audience watching the operation. In the case of a stereotype such as the Jew, a difference arises between the experience of the character and that of the audience. Hence, such a character can only function within a frame of attitudes created by a tradition outside his own person. In one kind of literature, the author thus seeks to understand the man, the individual. In the other kind, he tries at the same time to understand the race, the group.³⁴ It is in this sense that we speak of Shylock as the product of a “conditioned imagination”.

Shylock is introduced in the play specifically as a Jew stereotype. His conversation with Bassanio (I. iii. 1-34) is dominated by the overriding interest in money (“Three thousand ducats, well”) and his intense hatred for Christians: “Yes, to smell pork, to eat of the habitation which your prophet the Nazarite conjured the devil into: I will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, walk with you and so following: but I will not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray with you”. The blasphemous reference to Christ could not have gone unnoticed and unappreciated in Christian Elizabethan England. The effect of this blasphemy and this usuriousness is further heightened by Shylock's self-confessed reasons for hating Antonio. They are reasons, in fact, which place Shylock irrevocably in the tradition of the anti-Christ and the inveterate usurer.

I hate him for he is a Christian:
But more(35) for that in low simplicity
He lends out money gratis, and brings down
The rate of usance here with us in Venice.

(I. iii. 37-40)

The fact that this hatred and this usuriousness are “self-confessed” suddenly gives a certain plausibility to what was, all along, a conventional assumption. Shylock does not become an “individual” because he gives expression to this confession, but because of our disposition to believe the dramatic convention of a confession as affirming our experience of that kind of character. If, for example, Shylock had denied these characteristics, he would have then seemed to us an idealized and “unrealistic” characterization.³⁶

In III. i, Shakespeare allows Shylock his spirited and persuasive speech complaining of the inhuman treatment he has received at the hands of the Christians, and, in effect, asserting that he, too, is as mortal a man as the Christian. The speech has been used frequently to justify a reading of the play as representing Shakespeare's plea for a humane treatment of Jews. It is a speech, according to Dover Wilson, which makes Shylock “entirely more human than the conventional Jew of Il Pecorone or than the magniloquent monster created by Marlowe.”³⁷ On the other hand, Allan Bloom, who describes Shylock's speech as “an appeal to the universality of humanity”, finds that Shylock “includes only things which belong to the body” in his list of characteristics on which he bases his claim to equality with his Christian tormentors. “What he finds in common between Christian and Jew is essentially what all animals have in common. The only spiritual element in the list is revenge.”³⁸

To be properly understood, the speech has to be seen first as the culmination of the Jew-Christian contrast begun by Salerio a few lines earlier. Shylock had called Jessica his “own flesh and blood. … I say my daughter is my flesh and my blood.” Salerio's retort is definite: “There is more difference between thy flesh and hers than between jet and ivory” (III. i. 31, 33, 34-35). This contrast between Shylock and Jessica, the true Jew and the convertite, is pressed further in Shylock's speech. Shylock is thus not really pleading for compassion; he is justifying his determination to revenge. Antonio, he argues, had no other reason for scorning and mocking him than that he is a Jew. From this premise, Shylock derives the major thrust of his argument:

Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is?—if you prick us do we not bleed? if you tickle us do we not laugh? if you poison us do we not die? and if you wrong us shall we not revenge?—if we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? revenge! If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example?—why revenge! The villainy you teach me I will execute and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.

(III. i. 52-66)

Thus Shylock works himself into commitment to revenge by establishing both the irrational and the hypocritical nature of Christian humility and sufferance.³⁹ It is this argument that Shylock has devised to answer Salerio's anti-Jewish jibe.

SAL.
Why I am sure if [Antonio] forfeit, thou wilt not take his flesh,—what's that good for?(40)
SHY.
To bait fish withal,—if it will feed nothing else, it will feed my revenge; he hath disgrac'd me. …

(III. i. 45-49)

Having thus understood Shylock's argument, we have to recognize a second point, namely that the meaning of “Jew” in Shylock's speech is unspecified. Shylock takes “Jew” here in its most non-pejorative or neutral sense. Elsewhere in the play, however, the name is consistently used in a disparaging sense. In most cases, it is actually used to represent usuriousness, blasphemousness, and unkindness.⁴¹ In such circumstances “to hate a Jew” would, by definition, mean to hate a covetous and uncharitable anti-Christ. Sigurd Burckhardt was quite right in claiming that the rhetorical thrust of Shylock's quarrel with Antonio forces our sympathies to go to the Jew at that point: “Shylock gets more than his share of good lines. … Shylock is powerful in his vindictiveness. … Antonio is grandiloquent.”⁴² But this is not the complete story. The speech is in no way a denial of the grounds on which hatred of the Jew was established in the first place—his self-confessed hatred of Christ (and Christians) and his unbridled usury. For as long, therefore, as “Jew” meant “anti-Christ and usurer”, Shylock's speech (like that of Edmund in King Lear or Caliban in The Tempest) will not carry any justification in itself.⁴³ European persecution of the Jews was not based on the belief that Jews were not capable of feeling pain. The pathos of Shylock's statement would in all certainty, then, be absorbed as a genuine but irrelevant protest, an evasion of the major issues in dispute. For the major conflict arises from the very fact of Shylock's Jewishness which made it all too certain that he would be the “stony adversary, an inhuman wretch, Uncapable of pity, void, and empty From any dram of mercy”, as the Duke himself describes Shylock (IV. i. 4-6).

The Trial Scene (IV. i) is an incomparable dramatization of these stock attitudes. The setting is “Venice. A Court of Justice.” But the Duke is apparently there to plead for mercy rather than give judgment in Justice. “I have heard”, Antonio tells the Duke, “Your grace hath ta'en great pains to qualify His rigorous course” (IV. i. 6-8). In his principal address to Shylock, the Duke reinforces the case for mercy in a peculiarly “Christian” manner. The world, he says, expects mercy from “this fashion of thy malice”, and “thy strange apparent cruelty”. Such a gesture of mercy would be expected even from the “brassy bosoms and rough hearts of flint” of “stubborn Turks and Tartars never trained To offices of tender courtesy.” In a deliberately malicious pun, the Duke in effect, asks from Shylock an un-Jewish virtue: mercy. “We all expect a gentle answer, Jew” (IV. i. 31-34).

That Shakespeare and his audience could not have expected mercy from Shylock we can surmise not only from the Duke's pun on a “gentle” (meaning a “gentile”) answer, but from the consistency of Shylock's own reply. Not only has he sworn by “our Holy Sabbath” against mercy, he would rather “let the danger light Upon your charter and your city's freedom”, than yield. Shylock then reverts to the argument of his speech in III. i, and follows what he had judged to be the irrational nature of traditional Jew-Christian hostility. This time, however, he is willing to attribute his harshness to a whim. “But say it is my humour,—is it answered?” (IV. i. 36, 38-39, 43.)⁴⁴ Or more specifically, a Jewish anti-Christian whim, as Shylock himself relates (“a lodg'd hate, and a certain loathing I bear Antonio”) and as Antonio confirms: “than which what's harder?—His Jewish heart!”

The harshness of these remarks should not, however, lead us to forget that The Merchant of Venice is a comedy and that, therefore, the trial scene is also, in essence, comic. It is a kind of comedy (Ben Jonson's Volpone is another example) where the high seriousness of the legal charge is reduced by the relative inconsequence of the punishment imposed. In The Merchant of Venice, moreover, the comedy of Portia's strategy in the Court Scene is of the same kind as the comedy of the Casket Scenes. In both cases, Portia has a rigged court which oddly enough is also a “just” court. The essence of the comedy in both instances is in the double surprise—first, in the fear that the deserving party will lose his cause through the meticulous justice of Portia's judgment, and, secondly, in the happy defeat of the worldly or un-Christian antagonist. In the Trial Scene, Portia is the defender of her love and her faith. The disguise hides this fact from both Shylock and Antonio and thereby enhances the suspense. She grants Shylock's legal right to exact his bond; she demands and gets a confession from Antonio of his liability. But she uses all this to impose on Shylock an obligation of Mercy: “Then must the Jew be merciful.”

Portia's speech on the quality of mercy is a set speech designed to win Antonio back from the clutches of a “heartless” Jew.⁴⁵ Shakespeare prepares for this speech by establishing the pathos of Antonio's Christian resignation to his “un-Christian” enemy: “I do oppose my patience to his fury, and am arm'd To suffer with a quietness of spirit, The very tyranry and rage of his” (IV.i.10-13). By introducing Portia and her speech on Mercy, and by insuring that Shylock rejects her appeal, Shakespeare, as it were, makes a conventional dramatization of a European stock-attitude seem very human indeed. The conflict between Shylock and Antonio accordingly becomes one between a Christian merchant—forgiving and godly—and a Jewish merchant—unforgiving and brutish. A Christian merchant was expected to yield to Portia's appeal. Shylock was not—as is borne out by the pattern of such Jew-Christian confrontations since the Middle Ages.

Ainsi nous voyons, que le rapport entre le Juif et le Chrétien, est celui du Mal et du Bien, du temporel et du spirituel. Le Chrétien est doué de toutes les qualités, le Juif—de tous les defauts. … Le Chrétien est altruiste, généreux; le Juif—égoiste, cupide. Le bourgeois Chrétien n'est guidé que par l'amour de Dieu, le Juif—par l'amour de l'or.⁴⁶

Portia adds another dimension to this stock dramatization. She links the plea for Mercy with the threat of damnation. Shylock's willingness to forgive would, in other words, also secure salvation for the Jew.

                                                                                                    therefore, Jew
Though justice be thy plea, consider this,
That in the course of justice, none of us
Should see salvation. …

(IV. i. 193-196)

Thus Shylock's “Daniel come to judgement” is also (perhaps, primarily) a partisan on the side of authority, the “protector of the King”, as her assumed name of Balthazar implies. The consequent outwitting of Shylock at his own game (“I crave the law”) accordingly becomes a double victory for Portia: it enables her to achieve her personal objective of freeing her husband's friend and allows her to establish a clear superiority of Christian over Jew, love and mercy over hatred and justice. The entire suspense depends on the audience being disturbed at the possibility of Christian Antonio being made over to the ruthless Jew. The comedy is in the disappointment of this possibility, in the victory of Christian over Jew.

It is interesting, from this point of view, to note the emphasis placed on Shylock's Jewishness after his rejection of Portia's plea. In the rest of the trial, scene, Shylock is addressed by his name on only three occasions, but fifteen times as “the Jew”. The five references to “Christian” in this part of the scene are intended as contrasts to “Jew”.⁴⁷

This particular contrasting of Shylock and Antonio is itself part of a larger statement concerning the false and the true religion. For Antonio represents the true Christian blend of Justice and Mercy. As the “just” man, he asks Shylock to bestow the income of half his fortune on Jessica and Lorenzo. As the “merciful” man, he demands that Shylock become a Christian. This demand, in fact, is both punishment⁴⁸ and (to the Christian conscience) kindness.⁴⁹ For conversion—the acceptance of Christ—had implications which were closely associated with the very basis of anti-Jewishness. Conversion, then, was the only kind of assurance of future goodwill which a Jew could give or which would have been completely acceptable to the Christian imagination. In other words, conversion was not required of Shylock because he was a “wicked” man but because he was a Jew. For a “good” Jew also needed conversion, as one of Boccaccio's stories shows. Jehannot, the Christian,

had particular friendship for a very rich Jew called Abraham, who was also a merchant and a very honest man and trusty man, and seeing the latter's worth and loyalty, it began to irk him some that the soul of so worthy and discreet and good a man should go to perdition for default of faith; wherefore he fell to beseeching him on friendly wise leave errors of the Jewish faith and turn to the Christian verity. …

… [He] raised him from the sacred fount and named him Giovanni … and thenceforth was a good man and a worthy and one of a devout life.⁵⁰

The offer of conversion to Shylock was partly based on this tradition and on the other tradition of hypocrisy which we saw manifested in the Proclamation in The Jew of Malta. Shylock does not accept the offer, he merely succumbs to the pressure:

I am not well,—send the deed after me,
And I will sign it.

(IV. i. 392-393)

The distinction comes out quite clearly in Jessica, who combines the examples of Boccaccio's Giovanni and Marlowe's Abigail and ceases to be a Jew. “I shall be sav'd by my husband,—he hath made me a Christian” (III. v. 17-18). It is the holy nature of her rejection of father and faith, symbolized in the marriage with Lorenzo, that makes her so endearing to the Christian imagination and so endowed with all the tenderness of a lady of Romance.⁵¹

The revival of the Shylock-debate in the Quatercentenary issue of Shakespeare Quarterly is a reminder to us that the theoretical resolution of the interpretation of a kind of character like Shylock has not yet been attempted. Some critics who want to be anti-Jewish will read the play as if the fact of Shylock's usury and mercilessness is proof of Jewish unkindness. Others, who think Shakespeare was above prejudice, see the play as a kind of defence of the man. Both groups of critics tend to a conclusion for which there is no justification: that powerful literature is not possible to an author who shares the strong positive prejudices of his civilization. The problem of Shylock's characterization is one peculiar to a character-type which develops such great permanence in alien culture that it is no longer possible to differentiate the individual from the stereotype in him. Today, Shylock is not seen in the light of the Christian European imagination which originally celebrated him, but rather in terms of recent concepts of race-prejudice and of the problems of a minority. Shakespeare's Shylock was addressed to a specific English audience. The creation of a Jew who did not have the characteristics of either Marlowe's Barabas or Shakespeare's Shylock, a Jew who did not serve as a comment on the accumulated religious pre-judgments of the Christian conscience, would have required the reconditioning of the total experience of the contemporary culture. Thus, however human Shylock may seem—in the sense that he is subject to pain, humiliation and revenge—he remains a “Jew”, usurious and bitterly anti-Christian.

It is certainly not an accident that there are not unconverted good Jews in Elizabethan drama. Jew-baiting in such a community was not a mark of prejudice, if by the word we mean a response which is private, whimsical, malicious in intent, and resented by the community. Indeed, such baiting was often thought honorable and high-minded. Quoting Cyrillus and agreeing with him, Sir Walter Raleigh maintained that “Cain and Abel were figures of Christ, and of the Jewes; … as Cain after that he had slaine Abel uniustly, he had thence-forth not certaine abiding in the World: so the Jewes, after they had crucified the Sonne of God, became Runnegates: and it is true, that the Jewes had neuer since any certaine Estate, Commonweale, or Prince of their owne vpon the Earth.”⁵² So also in the Epistle Dedicatory to the English translation of Mornay's The Trewnesse of the Christian Religion (1587), Golding contends that

if any atheist Infidel or Jew having read this his work with aduisement, shall yet denye the Christian Religion to be the true and only pathway to eternal felicitie, and all other Religions to bee mere vanitie, and wickedness; must needes show himself vtterly voyd of humaine sense, or els obstinatly and wilfully bent to impugne the manifest truth against the continuall testimonie of his own conscience.⁵³

Such was the sense of conviction and the temper of the Christian mind for which Shakespeare wrote. To understand the Jew in Elizabethan drama, we have to seek to recreate that attitude to what must have seemed “a very terrible and powerful alien, endowed with all the resources of wealth and unencumbered by any Christian scruples”.⁵⁴

Shylock was before everything else a non-Christian, a Jew. The Merchant of Venice is a comedy written for an Elizabethan audience about a Jew. All the terms count.

Notes

1. Irving Ribner, “Marlowe and Shakespeare”, SQ [Shakespeare Quarterly], XV (Spring, 1964), 44-49.

2. George I. Duthie, Shakespeare (Hutchinson's University Library). London, 1951, p. 37.

3. In Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, I (London, 1957), 472.

4. Quoted in Ribner, pp. 44-45, n. 7.

5. Shakespearean Comedy (London, 1949), p. 127.

6. Bernard Grebanier, The Truth About Shylock (New York, 1959), p. x.

7. He points this out (p. 47) in connection with Abigail's “conversion” where the Friar “laments above all else the death of a seducible virgin.”

8. The Jew of Malta, ed. H. S. Bennett (London, 1930), I. ii. 68ff.

9. See the interesting observation in Il Pecorone (Bullough, p. 472) on the Jew's reason for insisting on a pound of flesh: “many merchants joined together in offering to pay the money, but the Jew would not have it, for he wished to commit this homicide in order to be able to say that he put to death the greatest of the Christian merchants.”

10. See Grebanier, p. 19. Grebanier's book contains a wealth of relevant historical and related data on the Jew in European history.

11. W. M. Foley, “Marriage”, Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, ed. James Hastings, I (New York, 1908), 133.

12. Grebanier, p. 19.

13. See Grebanier, p. 20.

14. Grebanier, p. 20.

15. In Patrologia Cursus Completus, ed. J. Migne (Paris, 1850), LXXXVII, 481.

16. Ibid., p. 103. Cf. Shylock's reply in IV.i, to Portia's speech, on Mercy: “My deeds upon my head.”

17. See also Patrologia Cursus Completus, LXXXVII, 235: “Quam Noah nuditatem, id est, passionem Christi, videns Cham, derisit, et Judaei Christi mortem videntes subsannaverunt.”

18. E.g. Matt. xxvii: 26-31; Mark xv: 15-20 and John xix: 1-3.

19. A. W. Pollard, English Miracle Plays (Oxford, 1909), p. xxxiii. The Catholic Liturgy still has traces of this interpretation of Good Friday. “Oremus et pro perfidis Judaeis: ut Deus et Dominus noster auferat velamen de cordibus eorum; ut et ipsi agnoscant Jesum Christum Dominum nostrum.” At other points in this sequence, the priest says “Flectamus genua” after the “Oremus”. The Missal specifically states that after the prayer for the Jews, the “Flectamus is omitted, and the clergy and people do not kneel down.” After a few more prayers, there follows the Reproaches in which the Priest (representing God) speaks of his rejection by the Jews. “Quia eduxi te de terra Aegypti: parasti crucem Salvatori tuo.” “Popule meus, quid feci tibi? aut in quo contristavi te? responde mihi”, etc.

20. H. Fisch, The Dual Image: A Study of the Figure of the Jew in English Literature (London, 1959), pp. 13-14.

21. Deut. xxiii: 19-20 “You shall not lend upon interest to your brother, interest on money, interest on victuals, interest on anything that is lent for interest. To a foreigner you may lend upon interest, but to your brother you shall not lend upon interest.” See also Grebanier, p. 78.

22. See J. L. E. Ortolan, The History of Roman Law (London, 1871), pp. 105-106.

23. Quoted in Grebanier, p. 79.

24. G. Friedlander, Shakespeare and the Jew (London, 1921), pp. 26-27.

25. Grebanier (p. 80) notes that this position was not changed till 1830 when “moderate interest” was made permissible.

26. William of Auxerre is said to have found the prohibition “even more rigorous than the commandment against murder: there is no exception to the law of usury, whereas it is on occasion even meritorious to kill.” See B. N. Nelson, The Ideas of Usury (Princeton, 1949), p. 13.

27. Allan Bloom points out in his Shakespeare's Politics (New York, 1964), p. 16, that the Jews in Venice were “well off and enjoyed the full protection of the law. … Shylock's claim against Antonio rests entirely on that law.” Antonio himself takes pride in this fact in Merchant III. iii. 26-31. All references are to J. Russell Brown's Arden edition (London, 1955).

28. See John Webster's The White Devil (1612) III. ii. 45-46: “… If there were Jews enough, so many Christian would not turn usurers.”

29. The Jew of Malta I. i. 112-113; 103-104.

30. See Leah W. Wilkins, “Shylock's Pound of Flesh and Laban's sheep”, MLN [Modern Language Notes], LVII (1947), 28-30, and Norman Nathan's “Shylock, Jacob and God's Judgment”, SQ, I (October 1950), 255-259. They disagree with each other's conclusion. The explanation offered here differs from theirs.

31. See Beatrice D. Brown, “Medieval Prototypes of Lorenzo and Jessica”, MLN, XLIV (1929), 227-232.

32. Ribner misses this point completely. Jessica, he says (p. 48), “is an agent of her father's redemption”, forgetting apparently that Jessica and his gold were together all his life. E.g. III. i. 33. On the marriage of Jewish daughters and the laws of inheritance, see the Old Testament ruling in Numbers xxxvi: 6-12.

33. Compare The Jew of Malta I. ii. 68ff. and Merch. IV. i. 376-386. Marlowe is rebel enough to make Barabas call this Christian offer a sheer sin of theft against the 7th Commandment and worse than his sin against the 8th Commandment, “covetousness”.

34. See my M.A. Thesis (Cornell, 1963), “Some Negro Stereotypes in English Literature”, especially chapter I.

35. There is no reason to place much emphasis on this phrase since, technically, Antonio—being a Christian—was expected not to lend money at interest. If anything the phrase shows how interrelated the two aspects of Shylock's case against Antonio were. See J. Russell Brown's edition, pp. xlii-xlv.

36. Cf. Hazlitt's comment on Kean's rendering of Shylock. Kean had substituted a sardonic intellect and fiery spirit for the malevolence of earlier actors; in the process, Hazlitt observed, Shylock became “more than half a Christian. Certainly, our sympathies are much oftener with him than with his enemies. He is honest in his vices; they are hypocrites in their virtues.” Quoted by John Russell Brown, “The Realization of Shylock: A Theatrical Criticism”, Early Shakespeare (Stratford-Upon-Avon Studies, no. 3). London, 1961, pp. 193-194.

37. J. Dover Wilson, ed., The Merchant of Venice (Cambridge, 1953), p. xviii.

38. Shakespeare's Politics, p. 23. It is not really correct to say that “revenge” is the only spiritual element in the list. Shylock does mention “affections, passions”. In any case, as I point out later, the subject of his speech is Revenge.

39. See also Merchant I. iii. 156-158.

40. Shylock could not eat Antonio's flesh for it is neither the “fish” nor the “flesh” approved of in the Kashruth. Shylock appreciates the implied insult in his reply: “To bait fish withal.” Launcelot jokes in a similarly coarse vein in his conversation with Jessica in III. v: “this making of Christians will raise the price of hogs,—if we grow all to be pork-eaters, we shall not shortly have a rasher on the coals for money.”

41. E.g. Merchant I. iii. 173-175; II. ii. 106-108; II. iv. 34; II. vii. 51.

42. “The Merchant of Venice: The Gentle Bond”, ELH, XXIX (September 1962), 240-241.

43. See the description of this rhetorical tradition in E. Auerebach, Mimesis (New York, 1953), p. 34.

44. A racial, not merely a personal, whim, as it is taken to be in the case of Aaron in Titus Andronicus. See Eldred D. Jones, “Aaron and Melancholy in Titus Adronicus”, SQ, XIV (Spring 1963), 178-179. It is interesting, in any case, considering the argument of this paper, that Dr. Johnson felt the answer was given gratuitously “to aggravate the pain” of Shylock's adversaries.

45. Allan Bloom (p. 27) puts this bluntly: “Portia goes off to Venice to save Antonio, not out of any principle of universal humanity, but because he is her husband's friend, and Bassanio is involved in the responsibility for his plight.”

46. Manya Lifschitz-Holden, Les Juifs dans la littérature Française du moyen âge (New York, 1935), pp. 130-131.

47. E.g. “If thou dost shed One drop of Christian blood” (ll. 305-306); or “pay the bond thrice And let the Christian go” (ll. 314-315). It should be noticed that Il Pecorone merely states: “If you shed one drop of blood”, etc. (Bullough, p. 473); and that Shylock himself (in the second example) sees Antonio as “the Christian” rather than as “rival” or “debtor”.

48. In several medieval Miracle Plays, the conversion of Jewish merchants was effected by some divine intervention, and for good reason. “Le Juif converti sait faire un noble usage de sa fortune mal accumulée. ‘Qui'il out pris e muscie uilment. Il partage ses biens et pratique pieusement la charité que la religion chrétienne prescrit, car il aime Marie.’” In another example of a blaspheming Jewish merchant, the Saviour appears and says to him: “Ne m'insulte pas ainsi, o juif! Je ne peux avoir d'obligation ni abandonner non serviteur dans la souffrance; prends ce qui t'appartient”. Following this “le juif se fit baptiser avec sa femme et tous les siens.” Lifshitz-Golden, pp. 129-130; 131.

49. But see Grebanier, p. 29: the demand was “simply an act of extraordinary kindness to bring the nonbeliever into the true faith”.

50. The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio, tr. John Payne (London, 1931), pp. 25, 28.

51. Merchant V. i. 54-63; see J. Russell Brown, ed., The Merchant of Venice, “Introduction”, p. xli, for a brief account of the interpretation of the character and tradition of Jessica.

52. The Historie of the World (London, 1614), p. 61.

53. Quoted in R. W. Battenhouse, Marlowe's Tamburlaine (Nashville, 1941), p. 33.

54. The Jew of Malta, ed. H. S. Bennett (London, 1930), p. 19.