SOURCE: Edelman, Charles, ed. Introduction to The Merchant of Venice, by William Shakespeare, pp. 1-93. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

[In the following excerpt, Edelman documents the performance history of The Merchant of Venice, paying particular attention to the actors who have played Shylock.]

Mark Twain is thought to have said that Shakespeare was not really the author of the plays, ‘they were written by someone else of the same name’. Although the comment appears nowhere in Mark Twain's works, and has been attributed to others in relation to Homer, not Shakespeare, it still serves as the most sensible solution to the perennial authorship question. Similarly, this introduction, especially when looking at the play as it was first performed, is not about Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, but about another play, also by Shakespeare, of the same name.

In fact, it is very possible that our play was not originally known as The Merchant of Venice: on 22 July 1598, perhaps a year or two after the first performance, ‘a booke of the Merchaunt of Venyce otherwise called the Jewe of Venyce’ was entered for printing at the London Stationers' Register. This is both revealing and reassuring, since The Jew of Venice is a more appropriate title—when printed in 1600, The Merchant of Venice may have been preferred only to avoid confusion with Marlowe's The Jew of Malta.

Critics are fond of pointing out that Shylock is not the ‘Merchant of Venice’, and that his is not an especially long role, appearing in only five scenes. But amongst the male characters, Shylock has the largest part, with nearly twice as many lines as Antonio—no less than Hamlet, this is a play with a central star role, one so famous that like Cervantes's Quixote and Dickens's Scrooge, he has become a common word, a distinction not even Hamlet can claim; today, in our age of ‘director's theatre’, Merchant performances are, like Hamlet performances, usually identified by the name of the main actor, not the director.

There is one enormous difference, however, between Shylock and Hamlet or any other great Shakespearean character: The Merchant of Venice is unique in that we are told that a performance in Shakespeare's time, and the audience's appreciation of it, would have been entirely different from what we experience today.

THE MERCHANT OF VENICE IN THE 1590S

In his review of Peter Hall's 1989 production, Jack Kroll of Newsweek (1 January 1990) makes what has been a standard observation in Merchant [The Merchant of Venice] criticism for over two hundred years, that ‘Shakespeare's first audience would have been amazed’ by a sympathetic portrayal of a Jew. Although Kroll finds Dustin Hoffman's ‘painfully real’ Shylock impressive, he qualifies his approval by quoting Harold Bloom's opinion, ‘“an honest production of the play, sensitive to its values, would now be intolerable in any Western country”’.

Indeed, in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Bloom proves an eloquent spokesman for this most enduring of Shakespearean myths:

One would have to be blind, deaf, and dumb not to recognize that Shakespeare's grand, equivocal comedy The Merchant of Venice is nevertheless a profoundly anti-Semitic work … The unfortunate Dr Lopez, Queen Elizabeth's physician, was hanged, drawn, and quartered (possibly with Shakespeare among the mob looking on), having been more or less framed by the Earl of Essex and so perhaps falsely accused of a plot to poison the Queen. A Portuguese converso [converted Jew] whom Shakespeare may have known, poor Lopez lives on as a shadowy provocation to the highly successful revival of Marlowe's The Jew of Malta in 1593-4, and presumably Shakespeare's eventual overcoming of Marlowe in The Merchant of Venice, perhaps in 1596-7.¹

However, like the famous non-barking dog in the Sherlock Holmes story, the curious thing about the evidence connecting Lopez to Marlowe and Shakespeare is its non-existence. Marlowe's play was always a money-spinner; Henslowe records that it took in thirty-five shillings when acted in February of 1593, and the following year it played to good houses before Lopez's execution.² There is no good reason to think that things would have been different had Lopez never existed, for Lopez's being, or having been, a Jew was hardly mentioned at his trial. So far as can be found from prosecutor Sir Edward Coke's notes, neither he nor anyone else said, or even implied, that being a Jew was an indicator of treacherous intention—Coke was trying to establish a Catholic, not a Jewish assassination plot.³ Whether or not Lopez was guilty (current scholarship indicates that he was)⁴ is beside the point—if he was railroaded, his having been Jewish had nothing to do with it. From the time of Lopez's indictment and trial to his execution on 7 June 1594, there is no record of victimisation of other Jews in London, or of any call to expel Jews or conversos residing there.

Obviously, one may still argue that even without the inspiration of Lopez, the original Shylock conformed to an anti-Semitic stereotype, but no such theatrical tradition existed. The only Jew to appear in extant Elizabethan drama before Marlowe's Barabas is the moneylender Gerontus in Robert Wilson's The Three Ladies of London (1584)—he is the most honourable character in the play, the most contemptible being Mercadore, an Italian merchant. Still, John Gross writes, ‘to an Elizabethan audience, the fiery red wig that [Shylock] 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

This ‘fiery red wig’, which will reappear in our story, has a rather strange history. There is no mention of Barabas's hair colour in Marlowe's play, neither is there any real connection between Barabas and Judas; even if there were, while ‘it is an old and familiar tradition that Judas Iscariot had red hair, the actual evidence is rather scattered and not very abundant’.⁶ In 1846, the noted scholar John Payne Collier discovered and published a poem written on the occasion of Richard Burbage's funeral, which reads, in part,

Heart-broken Philaster, and Amintas too
Are lost forever, with the red-hair'd Jew.(7)

Like most of Collier's ‘discoveries’, this was a forgery—he claimed to have seen and copied it from an original in the library of the antiquarian Richard Heber (conveniently Heber had died in 1833, and his entire collection was auctioned off). Why Collier decided to give Shylock red hair is hard to say; perhaps he was influenced by Thomas Jordan's crude ballad, ‘The Forfeiture’, published in 1664. Sung to the tune of ‘Dear, let me now this evening dye’, it starts

You that do look with Christian hue
Attend unto my Sonnet
I'le tell you of as vilde a Jew
As ever wore a Bonnet

and goes on to tell a twisted version of the Merchant in which Jessica, not Portia, dresses up as a lawyer and tricks her father, who

… by usury and trade
Did much exceed in riches:
His beard was red, his face was made
Not much unlike a Witches.

To think this doggerel could have anything to do with The Merchant of Venice as it was performed more than sixty years previously is positively ludicrous, yet E. E. Stoll, in his often-cited argument for the ‘traditional’ Shylock, accepts the work of the ‘old actor’ (Jordan had worked as an actor at the end of the Caroline era) as proof of Shylock's appearance.⁸

If we assume that all Elizabethans hated Jews, then we can easily assume that it was fine for Antonio to call Shylock a dog, to spit at him and then demand that he become a Christian. But we might also assume that Shakespeare and many others at a London playhouse knew a good deal about Venice, and would therefore know that a ‘real’ Antonio would have earned little approval. Although Venice segregated Jews into the world's first Ghetto, established in 1516, it guaranteed them the right to go about their business, and to practise their religion, free from interference or molestation,⁹ and while Jews were always regarded as candidates for conversion, any attempt to force them to convert was forbidden by law.¹⁰ It is often argued that Shakespeare's audience would have approved of Antonio's version of ‘mercy’, because baptism would save Shylock's soul, with or without his permission, but Shylock has been placed in a position similar to that of the Jews of Spain one hundred years earlier: convert, or make their living elsewhere. To many, Shylock's forced baptism would have been associated with the Spaniards, who had just tried to murder the Queen, and with the Papacy, which had excommunicated her in 1570.

Even if Shylock's religion, in itself, is not enough to make him a villain to the original audience, there is still the matter of Shylock as usurer to be considered. People making their way to the playhouse to see The Merchant of Venice in 1597 could stop at a bookstall and buy Miles Mosse's moral tract condemning the charging of any interest, The Arraignment and Conviction of Usurie, but they could also buy a book containing tables of interest rates.¹¹ No economy can exist without the availability of credit, and except for an extremely conservative faction, it was accepted that usury was the charging of excessive interest. In the absence of loan banks, ordinary citizens borrowed money from an acquaintance, or found an acquaintance to act as broker to negotiate the loan with someone else. One prosperous Englishman who loaned large sums at interest, sued when he was not repaid and also acted as a broker, was William Shakespeare of Stratford.¹²

The latter parts of this Introduction will show that it in recent times, few productions of the Merchant can take place without public discussion over whether it should be performed at all, or at the very least, without school packs or other material justifying its presentation, explaining that the original audience held different attitudes than we do today. Ironically, this can have an effect opposite to what is intended: the natural response to The Merchant of Venice, from those rare persons with no ‘knowledge’ of it before entering the theatre, is likely to be similar to that of the spectator once observed by Heinrich Heine: ‘When I saw this play at Drury Lane, there stood behind me in the box a pale, fair Briton, who at the end of the Fourth Act, fell to weeping passionately, several times exclaiming, “The poor man is wronged.”’¹³ ‘Passionate weeping’ is not required, nor are we expected to think of Shylock as a person free of serious faults (obviously, he is not), yet the entire history of our play, everywhere in the world, shows that it has been most successful when Shylock was not acted as a villain, or thought to be one. For us to fully understand the history of Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice in production, we must replace it with that ‘other’ Shakespeare play of the same title.

That play was a success: the title page of the 1600 Quarto notes that it was acted ‘divers times’; the first recorded performance was at court on 10 February 1605, followed by a second performance two days later. Since Shylock is the largest and best male part, it is likely that Burbage was the first to play him, but no genuine contemporary document confirms this, and any speculation about casting is only that. Whoever the actors may have been, the Merchant's place in the King's Men's repertoire nine or ten years after it was written argues for its popularity, but there is no further record of the play being shown, in any form, until George Granville's adaptation, The Jew of Venice, opened in 1701.

GRANVILLE'S JEW OF VENICE

Jewish presence in England increased markedly during the 1600s: as W. D. Rubinstein notes, the Commonwealth had an underlying culture of philo-Semitism, the Puritans seeing themselves in many respects as the re-embodiment of Old Testament Judaism.¹⁴ In 1656, Cromwell gave the Jews permission to remain in England and to open their first synagogue in Creechurch Lane.

During the Restoration, Jewish economic power and status rose further. It was still a tiny community, and nearly all Portuguese or Spanish Sephardim:  in 1677 a London directory had forty-eight Portuguese, and two German (in Hebrew, Ashkenazi) names.¹⁵ As the Glorious Revolution approached, Anglo-Jews were officially residents—politically, they were essentially the English branch of Holland's Jewish community, something much to their advantage, for the Revolution could not have succeeded without the financial support of the Dutch-Jewish company of Machado and Pereira.¹⁶ Although this point is disputed by historians, Rubinstein and David S. Katz argue persuasively that from the Glorious Revolution until late Victorian times, the status of England's Jews was little different from that of the Quakers or other dissenters, and in many respects was better than that of English Catholics.¹⁷ On 23 June 1700, William III knighted Solomon de Medina, a rich London Jew who was in partnership with Machado and Pereira; six months later The Jew of Venice opened at Lincoln's Inn Fields.

Granville retains much of Shakespeare's text, but many passages are shortened, altered or transposed,¹⁸ and Morocco, Arragon, the Gobbos, Solanio, Salarino and Salerio (the ‘Salads’) are omitted. Taking the place of the missing scenes is a banquet at the end of Act II, when Shylock, Bassanio and Antonio celebrate the ‘merry bond’ by offering toasts to wealth, and then witness an elaborate masque, ‘Peleus and Thetis’.

The prologue, spoken by the ghosts of Shakespeare and Dryden, is perhaps of greater interest than anything in the play proper. ‘Shakespeare’ announces,

To day we punish a Stock-jobbing Jew.
A piece of Justice, terrible and strange;
Which, if persu'd, would make a thin Exchange.

The late 1690s and early 1700s saw a major shift in economic power ‘from countryside to town, and from landowner to businessman, profoundly unsettling the traditional order’.¹⁹ Particularly notorious were the ‘stock-jobbers’, busily amassing wealth through speculative dealings in joint-stock ventures: their excesses led to an Act of 1697, restricting their number in London to one hundred, with twelve places reserved for Jews and twelve for other ‘aliens’. So Shylock, once a Venetian moneylender, has become a London dealer in investment schemes, despised by arch-Tories such as Granville.

Thomas Betterton was a sixty-six-year-old Bassanio, and Anne Bracegirdle played Portia. Thomas Doggett, who played Shylock, was one of the most popular comic actors of his day: according to Colley Cibber, who admired Doggett greatly, Congreve wrote the characters of Ben in Love for Love and Fondlewife in The Old Bachelor expressly for him.²⁰ Records of London's 1700-1 theatre season are scanty, and we do not know how often The Jew of Venice was performed, but in any event it is difficult to agree with Gross's view that The Jew of Venice ‘held the stage for forty years’,²¹ for it was hardly ever seen after 1701. There is record of one performance in May 1703, three in the 1721-2 season and two in 1722-3, but none at all for the ensuing three years, and less than one a year after that—with just one recorded performance between 1736 and 1741. Given these circumstances, it is fair to say that Granville's adaptation, while interesting in and of itself, plays little part in the performance history of The Merchant of Venice. No tradition existed in the interpretation of Shylock, or of any other role, when Charles Macklin took the stage on 12 February 1741, and no expectation on the part of the Drury Lane audience had to be confirmed or denied. The Merchant of Venice was a new play.

‘THE JEW THAT SHAKESPEARE DREW’

Born in Ireland in 1699, Charles Macklin was a popular favourite in a variety of roles amongst provincial audiences of the early 1730s. John Fleetwood, the patent holder of Drury Lane, engaged him to play small parts for the 1733-4 season, but that season fell into disarray when a dispute between Fleetwood and the actors, led by Theophilus Cibber, led to the defection of Cibber's group to the Haymarket. Macklin remained loyal to Fleetwood, though, and his importance at Drury Lane grew.

Several factors contributed to Drury Lane's decision to mount The Merchant of Venice in 1741: the renewal and strengthening of the Stage Licensing Act in 1737 placed the Lord Chamberlain in charge of theatrical censorship, establishing ‘a much more rigorous system of state surveillance, which would endure until 1968’, over the theatre.²² The inherent difficulties in getting a play approved encouraged managements to rely on Shakespeare and others whose plays were already part of the repertoire, and not subject to new scrutiny. Furthermore, there was no need to set the takings of the third performance aside, as was customary, for an ‘author's benefit’.²³ Since the Merchant, in its original text, had not been performed within living memory, it would have brought with it the excitement of a famous play being seen for the first time by everyone present, the perfect vehicle for a popular actor in his first starring role.

Descriptions of Macklin's Shylock are consistent in giving us a fierce and malevolent figure, driven by his hatred of Antonio. Francis Gentleman was only thirteen in 1741, and his Dramatic Censor was published in 1770, so he presumably saw Macklin in the 1760s:

in the level scenes his voice is most happily suited to that sententious gloominess of expression the author intended; which, with a sullen solemnity of deportment, marks the character strongly; in his malevolence, there is forcible and terrifying ferocity; in the third act scene, where alternate passions reign, he breaks the tones of utterance, and varies his countenance admirably; in the dumb action of the trial scene, he is amazingly descriptive; and through the whole displays such unequalled merit, as justly entitles him to that very comprehensive, though concise compliment paid him many years ago, ‘This is the Jew that Shakespeare drew.’²⁴

The famous ‘concise compliment’ is attributed to Alexander Pope, supposedly paid when he and Macklin met after a performance.

Portia was played by Kitty Clive, a delightful comedienne who received more unfavourable criticism for this performance than for any in her long career.²⁵ Gentleman calls it ‘a ludicrous burlesque on the character … in the spirited scene she was clumsy … in the grave part—sure never was such a female put into breeches before!—she was awkwardly dissonant’. In the trial, ‘as if conscious she could not get through without the aid of trick, [she] flew to the pitiful resource of taking off the peculiarity of some judge, or noted lawyer; from which wise stroke, she created laughter in a scene where the deepest attention should be preserved’.²⁶

Macklin's text for the 1740-1 season, although probably abbreviated, would have been very close to the Quarto text of 1600. There is no record of any interpolation, and all characters, including Morocco and Arragon, were present—Arragon fell out of the play during the first season, and was not seen again until Charles Kean's revival of 1858, but ‘Morochius’ appeared in some, although not all, London performances of the Merchant until 1757: the 1773 Bell edition, without either of Portia's unsuccessful suitors, is probably close to the play that Macklin performed later in his career.²⁷

On 7 May 1789, Macklin, at the age of ninety, began a performance, but found himself unable to continue past the first scene, and retired from the stage. For nearly fifty years, he had defined the role of Shylock.

GERMANY: SCHRöDER, IFFLAND, FLECK

As the Macklin era was drawing to a close, the history of The Merchant of Venice in modern Germany began. Friedrich Ludwig Schröder was chiefly responsible for introducing Shakespeare to the German theatre; in 1771 he took over the management of the Hamburg National Theatre from his stepfather Konrad Ackermann, and brought Hamlet to the stage in 1776, followed by Othello and The Merchant of Venice in 1777.

Using the translation of Christoph Martin Wieland, Schröder cut nearly all of the fifth act. Not much has been written about his Shylock—he is thought to have played him much as Macklin did, harsh and vindictive, while retaining some of the audience's sympathy.²⁸ More important, perhaps, than Schröder's own performances is the influence he had as guest director in Vienna, Mannheim and elsewhere—one of his associates in Mannheim was the playwright-actor August Wilhelm Iffland.²⁹

Schiller admired Iffland as an actor but did not think much of his plays,³⁰ perhaps because at the time they were more popular than Schiller's. During the 1780s the Mannheim National Theatre developed strongly under Iffland's leadership, and upon transferring to the National Theatre of Berlin, Iffland mounted several visually spectacular productions of Shakespeare.³¹ As the Jew, he presented a comical figure—indeed he may have been the first actor to play Shylock this way—speaking with a foreign accent, and regarded as ‘irksome’ and ‘impish’ rather than seriously threatening.³² He wore a ‘blue coat with fur trimming, a caftan and red stockings. His performance was an aggregation of small mannerisms, commonly accepted as typical of the Jews. He pattered across the stage with mincing footsteps, he walked in circles when worried, he crumpled his cap in distress during the trial scene.’³³

Ferdinand Fleck had his first success as Gloucester, opposite Schröder's Lear; he played Shylock in 1797, only four years before his death at the age of forty-one. His was a different Jew than Iffland presented: the poet, critic and Shakespeare translator Ludwig Tieck thought Fleck ‘horrible and ghostlike, but … always noble’.³⁴

ENTER KEMBLE

The 1788-9 season that saw Macklin's final exit from the English stage was also John Philip Kemble's first as manager of Drury Lane—the Merchant was performed once, on 17 January 1789, with Kemble as Shylock and his sister, Sarah Siddons, as Portia.³⁵ The handsome and dignified Kemble never considered himself suited to the role, however, and when he later staged the Merchant, it was usually with Tom King, the original Sir Peter Teazle and a much-loved actor, but no Shylock: the best that Gentleman could say about him was that his performance ‘is by no means so deficient as many principal parts’ then being acted in London.³⁶

Kemble published his own edition of the Merchant ‘as first acted at the Theatre Royal in Covent Garden’, in 1810. Taken together with Elizabeth Inchbald's 1808 edition, also ‘as Performed at the Theatre Royal’, these versions give us a reliable record of the play as it was presented at this time. As in the Bell edition, both Morocco and Arragon are missing, but the Kemble and Inchbald texts make some sense of the casket theme by rewriting Bassanio's choosing speech in 3.2.³⁷ Songs for Lorenzo and Jessica are interpolated, and except for the Shylock scenes, huge chunks of the play are deleted. Overall, though, Kemble retained more of the Quarto text than did Macklin, and the order of the scenes is not altered—that ‘improvement’ was yet to come.

While Kemble's work in preparing a relatively coherent text is to be admired, we should remember that his production was rarely seen—in the 1790s, aside from a few summer performances at the Haymarket, Londoners had the opportunity to see the Merchant only once every two years. But this changed when Thomas Harris and W. T. ‘Gentleman’ Lewis engaged George Frederick Cooke for the 1800-1 season at Covent Garden,³⁸ and London audiences learned what those in the provinces had known for years: the new Macklin had arrived. However, he did not stay long.

GEORGE FREDERICK COOKE, EDMUND KEAN

Cooke was forty-four years old when he made his debut at Covent Garden.³⁹ An actor of immense power, he would have had a long and distinguished career, but frequent non-appearances due to drunkenness made employing him a risky proposition: at the time, Covent Garden had no one to compare with Drury Lane's Kemble, so the risk was worth taking.

Like David Garrick, Cooke chose Richard III for his debut. His Shylock, first seen 10 November 1800, earned qualified praise from the Porcupine: ‘His acting was uncommonly striking, his knowledge of the author complete, but his declamation jars upon the ear, as he is accustomed to give a whole line on one unvaried harsh note … In every scene there was much, very much, to commend; in the great scene with Tubal, everything. The audience seemed electrified by his excellence in it.’⁴⁰

The 1800-1 season was the high point of Cooke's career; over the rest of the decade, non-appearances due to ‘indisposition’, and appearances that should have been non-appearances, grew too frequent for managements and audiences to tolerate. In 1810 he embarked on an American tour, and for the first time Americans could experience the full power of The Merchant of Venice. ‘Thespis’ of the New York Columbian writes that Cooke's performance was

more than acting, it was nature improved and refined by the most consummate art. Mr Cooke, beyond all other players that have appeared on the American boards, adheres with more critical accuracy and studied uniformity to the text and spirit of his author. He is less solicitous to attract admiration by polished gestures and striking attitudes … The great points of playing are, consequently, at times in some measure lost. No actor appears less inclined to gain applause, at the sacrifice of nature and propriety.⁴¹

Less than two years later Cooke died, virtually destitute, in New York. He was buried in the Strangers' Vault of St Paul's Church, and in 1820, another famous Shylock, Edmund Kean, had the remains moved to the churchyard and commissioned a monument to his great predecessor.

It may seem odd to place Edmund Kean near the end of a section, rather than the beginning, but contrary to what is generally believed, Kean did not bring any radically new conception to Shylock. The legend of his first appearance at Drury Lane has been recounted many times, and to say that it has been ‘embellished’ is to put it charitably.

An article in New Monthly Magazine of May 1834 relates that when Kean turned up at the theatre, an unnamed actor said, ‘I say! he's got a black wig and beard! Did you ever see Shylock in a black wig?’.⁴² This fanciful account, written after Kean's death, was accepted by Frederick William Hawkins, whose 1883 biography of Kean reveals that he took ‘a little black wig from his little bundle … heedless of or inattentive to the astonishment on the faces of his companions’.⁴³

But there is no compelling reason to believe that any Shylock wore a red wig before William Poel in 1898: Johann Zoffany's portrait of Macklin as Shylock shows him with dark brown hair, and a coloured engraving of Kemble's Shylock, issued in 1809, reveals him to be black-haired and bearded.⁴⁴ The notion that Kean would harbour a ‘secret’ Shylock, and play him differently than he had done so successfully in the provinces, is not only absurd, but is inconsistent with the one opening-night story that does have an air of truth about it: Kean's friend, Joseph Drury, former headmaster of Harrow, was in the house and is said to have murmured ‘he is safe!’ when the audience applauded Shylock's first line. Drury was living in retirement near Exeter, and had seen Kean perform there; should the actor have presented some new and different interpretation, Drury surely would have commented on it.

Playing before the same type of stock scenery Kemble would have had twenty years earlier, and using the same text, Kean's performance was well within the boundaries defined by his two most important predecessors. When ‘Mr Kean from Exeter’ stunned Drury Lane on 26 January 1814, it was as a new and brilliant actor, not a new and brilliant Shylock—had Kean emulated Garrick and Cooke, and chosen Richard III for his debut, the result would have been the same.

Coleridge's famous remark about Kean, ‘To see him act, is like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning’,⁴⁵ is not merely general praise, he is describing the most important element in Kean's approach to the art of acting. As Charles Shattuck notes, ‘Kean's forte was naturalism—the vivid realisation of exactly what emotional state, vocal tone, and bit of behavior was to be called up at every instant in the stage life of a character.’⁴⁶ Coleridge was not the only great poet to notice this: to Keats, ‘other actors are constantly thinking about their sum-total effect throughout a play. Kean delivers himself up to the instant feeling, without a shadow of a thought about anything else.’⁴⁷ These perceptions serve as reminder that whatever the ‘sum-total effect’ of Kean's Shylock, it did not derive from a considered interpretation of the role as an organic whole.

Kean impressed William Hazlitt, though Hazlitt correctly predicted in the Morning Chronicle of 27 January 1814 that the young actor would be ‘a greater favourite in other parts’. To Hazlitt, Kean did not sufficiently show the ‘the morose, sullen, inward, inveterate, inflexible malignancy of Shylock’, but

in giving effect to the conflict of passions arising out of the contrasts of situation, in varied vehemence of declamation, in keenness of sarcasm, in the rapidity of his transitions from one tone and feeling to another, in propriety and novelty of action, presenting a succession of striking pictures, and giving perpetually fresh shocks of delight and surprise, it would be difficult to single out a competitor.⁴⁸

Two years later, Hazlitt gave an even more favourable opinion, noting ‘Mr Kean's manner is much nearer the mark’,⁴⁹ and returned to the subject again in 1817, with a well-known, and most misleading, comment:

When we first went to see Mr Kean as Shylock, we expected to see, what we had been used to see, a decrepid old man, bent with age and ugly with mental deformity, grinning with deadly malice, with the venom of his heart congealed in the expression of his countenance, sullen, morose, gloomy, inflexible, brooding over one idea, that of his hatred, and fixed on one unalterable purpose, that of his revenge … so rooted was our habitual impression of the part from seeing it caricatured in the representation, that it was only from a careful perusal of the play itself that we saw our error …⁵⁰

Hazlitt's description of these other Shylocks has been accepted as ‘a composite portrait as actors since Macklin had presented him’,⁵¹ but who were these ‘decrepid old’ Shylocks, and when did Hazlitt see them? Hazlitt joined the Morning Chronicle as parliamentary and theatrical correspondent in 1812, and he is unlikely to have been a regular theatregoer before that. After his wedding in 1808, he resided at Winterslow in a cottage belonging to his wife—he may have seen Kemble or Cooke in the provinces, or in London, but what we know of these Shylocks hardly puts them into the ‘bent with age’ category. After Cooke, the Merchant was seldom seen in London: a more likely explanation is that Hazlitt's other Shylocks existed only in his imagination, and that he had rarely, if ever, seen The Merchant of Venice before January of 1814; Hazlitt would not have been the first newcomer to theatre criticism to claim more playgoing experience than he actually had.

This is not to say that Kean's Shylock was not in some respects more sympathetic than Macklin's or Cooke's. Shylock is an ‘outsider’, and as Jonathan Bate notes, Kean, with his illegitimate birth and poverty-stricken youth, was an outsider himself, who specialised in outsider parts. Such an actor would have special appeal to the radical Hazlitt, and to the Whig-dominated audience at Drury Lane, a theatre that served as a home ‘for Opposition politics, and a reading of Shakespeare as a friend of the people against the autocracy of government’.⁵² There is also the intriguing matter of Kean's own Jewish ancestry—his father had brothers named Aaron and Moses.⁵³ That this could have been a factor, even a major factor, in Kean's portrayal of Shylock is undeniable, but it is also undeniable that another of Kean's triumphs was Barabas in The Jew of Malta.

LUDWIG DEVRIENT, KARL SEYDELMANN

Just as Edmund Kean was the greatest of English Romantic actors, Ludwig Devrient held that status in Germany, and his Shylock commanded the German stage over the same period that Kean's did the English and American—they were nearly exact contemporaries. As Simon Williams notes, Devrient's Shylock seemed to have spent his life ‘building up resentment against the hated Christians; in fact, this hatred was the dominant concern of his life, making his demand for Antonio's flesh an act of desperate rebellion, a necessary consummation, yet a triumphant culmination of years of bitterness, suffering and martyrdom’.⁵⁴

Complicating any discussion of Devrient's characterisation is the fact that he often changed it, this inconsistency exacerbated by a serious drinking problem. He played Shylock

either with a distinctly dark skin or speaking in a recognisably Jewish accent, dressed as a Venetian Jew, or as a Polish or Hungarian Jew. But he always took care that the character's nobility—a quality which audiences constantly associated with European culture—was persistently to the fore … perhaps no German actor so completely embodied the tragic dimensions of the role.⁵⁵

Only a few years younger than Kean and Devrient, and also going to an early grave, was Karl Seydelmann. Born in Silesia, he made his way to the German stage via Prague, and came to be regarded as Devrient's successor in Berlin in the 1830s;⁵⁶ Mephistopheles, Iago and Shylock were some of his best roles. As the Jew, he ‘was the incorporation of a persecuted nation's accumulated wrath. Even in his outbursts of fiendish rejoicing over Antonio's ruin, in his sanguinary yearnings to take the life of his arch-enemy, in his tremulous exaltation whilst anticipating his revenge, he compelled his audience to feel that there was some justification for all those manifestations of extravagant excitement.’⁵⁷

WILLIAM CHARLES MACREADY

Yet another contemporary of Edmund Kean was William Charles Macready; he lived so much longer that he is easily mistaken for someone of a later era, but he was only five years younger, and after his London debut in 1816, he became Kean's rival for the unofficial title of England's leading actor. Macready first played Shylock at Covent Garden in 1823, when he was thirty, but only sporadically after that—he never considered it a good part for him, and given his triumphs as Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth and Claude Melnotte in The Lady of Lyons, there was little reason to persist. He did perform the Merchant somewhat more frequently in the late 1830s and early 1840s; he appears to have anticipated Irving in lending Shylock an unusual air of refinement. The Spectator (12 October 1839) said,

Mr Macready has endeavoured to give personal dignity to the Jew, and to soften down the ugly features of the character by assuming an erect port and a frank and cordial manner, that are quite inconsistent with the persecution and insults to which the whole tribe are subject; he makes us wonder that a man of his appearance should belong to a despised race, much more that he should be accustomed to such indignities as Shylock reminds Antonio of putting on him.

Macready's Portia at this time was Helen Faucit. She ‘became the gravity of the learned doctor better than the gayety of Portia; her sprightly sallies at the expense of her suitors were forced, and her modest sweetness was not wholly free from the approach of affectation’.⁵⁸ The Spectator closes by remarking, ‘we ought not to pass by the two scenes of Venice without praise, but they made others look shabby by comparison’.

The comparative quality of Macready's Venice and Belmont sets is not important; that the scenery should be mentioned at all is. The 1820s saw the introduction of gas and calcium lighting, i.e. ‘limelight’, to London's theatres, innovations that demanded greater attention to the quality of what was being illuminated, and Macready's tenure at Drury Lane marks the gradual transition from the ‘stock’ Merchant to one with scenery expressly designed for the play. In contrast to 1839, when only the Venice scenes were worthy of a brief comment, the December 1841 production drew this reaction from The Times:

The scenery is in the best possible taste, very beautiful, and yet nicely discriminated, so as not to overbalance the drama. The effect of the tribunal, with the forty, was most imposing, reminding us of that produced by the Roman Senate in Mr Macready's revival of Coriolanus. The moonlit garden in the fifth act is particularly beautiful, sparkling with soft light, and melting away into a poetic indistinctness at the back.⁵⁹

THE SOCIAL CONTEXT

From the time of Macklin through to the late nineteenth century, reviews of English productions make little mention of Shylock as a representative character of the Jewish race. One can only speculate why this was so: while not disregarding such phenomena as the debate over the Jew Bill of 1753, or the barriers that kept Nathan Rothschild, elected four times, from taking his seat in Parliament, it appears that the rights of England's Jewish population, always comparatively small, were not a major factor in English political life.⁶⁰

A progression of other Jewish characters made its way to the London stage. Ironically, the first was created by Charles Macklin in 1769, the Italian Jew Beau Mordecai, a minor figure in his enormously successful farce, Love à la Mode, where not only Mordecai, but the Scottish Sir Archibald Macsarcasm (the role Macklin wrote for himself), and the Irish Sir Callaghan O'Brallaghan are satirised. In 1772 Richard Cumberland wrote Napthali, a Jewish stockbroker and moneylender (a small part and one of the less likeable characters) into his comedy The Fashionable Lover; in the same year the broker Moses had a four-line role in Samuel Foote's The Nabob, followed two years later by the friendly Moses Manasses in Foote's The Cozeners. Sheridan gave the English theatre the ‘honest Israelite’ Moses in The School for Scandal (1776), and other kindly Jews followed: Sheva in Cumberland's The Jew (1794), Nadab in his comic opera The Jew of Mogadore (1808) and the warm-hearted central roles in two plays by Thomas Dibdin, Abednego in The Jew and the Doctor (1798), and Ephraim in The School for Prejudice (1801). Some of these plays were popular for a long time, and one, The School for Scandal, is a major work: except for Nadab, the Jewish characters are taken from contemporary English life, and that they are mostly sympathetic means that we have travelled some distance from Granville's ‘stock-jobbing Jew’.

Of infinitely greater importance was a brilliantly drawn character, taken not from the Exchange, but from London's underworld: with the publication of Oliver Twist in 1838, and its subsequent stage adaptations, Fagin, virtually overnight, replaced Shylock as the most important fictive Jew in English culture. Although Jews were never a large proportion of London's poor East End neighbourhoods, their increasing numbers during the nineteenth century inevitably meant that some would turn to crime: ‘Fagin was probably untypical of the run of London criminals of the time, but the portrait of him offered by Dickens was not an inaccurate depiction of the common view of the Anglo-Jewish malefactor.’⁶¹ As is well known, Dickens encountered protests about his depiction of Fagin, and later tried to make amends with the kindly Riah in Our Mutual Friend.

CHARLES KEAN

Macready's production, with its attention to details of staging, began a new phase in the Merchant's history, and it marked the close of another. The exclusive right of London's two patent theatres to perform spoken plays ended in 1843, and so the names Drury Lane and Covent Garden disappear from our story—they were devoted more and more to opera, while the newly licensed smaller houses such as the Haymarket (now allowed to operate throughout the year), the Princess's and the Lyceum became the focus of Shakespearean production in London.

The link between Macready and Charles Kean is direct, for the younger Kean used Macready's promptbooks, copied for him by the stage manager and prompter George Ellis, in preparing his own productions. His skills as an actor never approached those of his father, but as a director and theatrical manager his influence on Shakespeare in the English theatre was greater and more lasting. When he assumed control of the Princess's in 1851, Kean embarked on a series of Shakespearean productions, of which The Merchant of Venice, opening on 12 June 1858, was the most spectacular ever seen until that time. John William Cole provides this description of the opening scene:

The curtain draws up and we discover ourselves in Venice, the famed Queen of the Adriatic, ‘throned on her hundred Isles’ … we see the actual square of St Mark with the campanile and clocktower, the cathedral, and the three standards, painted from drawings taken on the spot; restored, as in 1600, when Shakespeare wrote the play, and the incidents he has so skilfully interwoven are supposed to take place. Throngs of picturesquely-contrasted occupants gradually fill the area, passing and re-passing in their ordinary avocations. Nobles, citizens, inquisitors, foreigners, traders, water-carriers, and flower-girls are there; a flourish of trumpets announces the approach of the Doge, who issues in state procession, on his way to some public ceremony.⁶²

Kean's text was also very different from anything seen before. Although their parts were much reduced, Morocco and Arragon were restored, The Times (14 June 1858) noting,

whereas the story of Portia and her caskets has hitherto seemed only subordinate to that part of the action in which Shylock and Antonio are chief figures, full justice is now done to the whole of the plot as designed by the author, and thus a play that has hitherto been attractive solely on account of certain isolated scenes is now interesting from beginning to end.

While the spectacle at the Princess's warranted the attention it received from the critics, the performances were unexciting: The Times did note that ‘Mr Charles Kean is seldom seen to more advantage than as Shylock’, but clearly the fire of his father, or even of Macready, was not lit. For developments in the acting of the Merchant, we must look to Germany and America.

DAWISON, BOOTH, MITTERWURZER

Bohumil Dawison made his acting debut at the age of nineteen in his native Warsaw; after establishing himself in Hamburg, he went on to important roles in Vienna and Dresden.⁶³ Known for his Hamlet, Othello, Lear and Richard III, he was the first Jewish actor to play Shylock in Europe, and he also toured to the United States. William Winter of the New York Tribune, as bigoted and vindictive a critic as the American theatre has ever known,⁶⁴ was usually suspicious of foreign actors, but he had some good things to say about Dawison's performance at New York's Stadt Theatre in September of 1866:

The chief merits of it were authority and executive skill. The chief defect of it was an indefinable yet clearly perceptible pettiness in the quality, fibre, or essence of the character. Whatever else Shylock may not be, he is terrible. Dawison's embodiment evinced duplicity, greed, and implacable malignity, but, notwithstanding his uncommon advantages of physical stature and intellectual force, it was not terrific … the dress was skilfully fashioned to accentuate the height and leanness of the figure; the elocution was exact, fluent, and consistent, marked by a slight accent, intended to denote that Shylock is a foreigner in Venice, and that accent was intensified in moments of vehement utterance.⁶⁵

In the spring of 1853, during the days of the California gold rush, the actress Catherine Sinclair, who had achieved some notoriety due to her recent divorce from Edwin Forrest, engaged a nineteen-year-old actor for a season at the San Francisco Theatre. The Placer Times and Transcript (9 September 1853) duly noted:

Last evening Mr Edwin Booth had a full house at this theatre on the occasion of his benefit. He performed for the second time the part of Shylock, in Shakespeare's play the Merchant of Venice. He was highly successful in this difficult delineation of character, giving promise of great future excellence in it. As Portia, Mrs Sinclair acquitted herself with much credit, her performances in the court scene being in our opinion, the most judicious and excellent piece of acting she has rendered on the San Francisco boards.

Booth went on to achieve an unchallenged pre-eminence amongst American actors; as with Edmund Kean, Shylock did not rank with Hamlet, Othello or Iago as one of his great roles, but he played the part often, especially as he grew older. His Jew was very much in the tradition established by Macklin—hard, cruel and single-minded in his pursuit of revenge—John Ranken Towse, one of the major critics of the day, writes ‘his portrayal was a most harmonious blend of racial prejudice and hate, insatiate avarice, dignity, craft, revengeful passion, and abject defeat. He made no pretence of elevating it with any touch of patriarchal or romantic nobility.’⁶⁶

For all of his fame, Booth cannot be seen as part of a move towards a greater naturalism that was later to distinguish Shakespearean acting in America, but in Germany this movement had begun. The actor Joseph Schildkraut says of Friedrich Mitterwurzer, ‘in a period when the German stage was dominated by the romantic and declamatory school of acting, [he] was one of the few exponents of the nascent era of realism’.⁶⁷ Known for his interpretation of Hjalmar Ekdal in The Wild Duck and other Ibsen characters, Mitterwurzer showed Shylock to be driven by malice, ‘the common moneypeddling Jew, rich beyond all measure, greedy and mendacious’,⁶⁸ a strange mix of the traditional German clown Hanswurst, and the intense realism he brought to Ibsen.⁶⁹

FROM THE BANCROFTS TO IRVING

Squire and Marie Bancroft were having great success with the genteel comedies of Tom Robertson at their small Prince of Wales Theatre on Tottenam Street,⁷⁰ so their decision to offer The Merchant of Venice in 1875 represented a new direction.

Charles Kean cut the Merchant drastically, but he did not alter the order of the scenes. The Bancrofts, hampered by a tiny stage, were forced to take a radical approach to the text: as Squire Bancroft recalls: ‘I took upon myself the great responsibility of rearranging the text of the Play, so as to avoid change of scene in sight of the audience, and to adapt the work, so far as possible, to its miniature frame.’⁷¹ He delayed 1.2 until after the first interval, and combined 1.1 and 1.3 into one scene, setting it ‘under the arches of the Doge's Palace … [with] a lovely view of Santa Salute’. The necessary passage of time between 1.1 and 1.3 was established ‘by carefully arranged processions and appropriate pantomimic action from the crowd of merchants, sailors, beggars, Jews, who were throughout passing and repassing’.⁷² Clement Scott mentions one important detail missing from Bancroft's list—gondolas—one seemed ‘to hear the ripple of water as [they] glide on’.⁷³

Bancroft's invention, born of the necessity to economise on set changes, became standard practice—while different actor-managers adopted different sequences, they always grouped the Venice and Belmont scenes, the journey from one to the other taking place during an interval. Beerbohm Tree, recalling the Bancroft Merchant years later, remarks that it was ‘the first production in which the modern spirit of stage management asserted itself, transporting us as it did into the atmosphere of Venice, into the rarefied realms of Shakespearian comedy’.⁷⁴

The production was not a success, due mostly to Charles Coghlan's decision to underplay Shylock in a style more suited to the modern comedies in which he had excelled, ‘a moody, sulky, and uninteresting person’.⁷⁵ Obviously, one cannot have a good Merchant without a good Shylock, but the Bancrofts came close, for as Tree remembers, ‘it was here that Ellen Terry first shed the sunlight of her buoyant and radiant personality on the character of Portia’.⁷⁶

ENTER PORTIA

Portia is by far the largest part in the play, but some aspects of the character place her out of the first rank of Shakespeare's comic heroines. Although a transvestite role, it is not one of the ‘breeches’ parts so loved in the Restoration theatre:⁷⁷ instead of dressing up like Rosalind, ‘in all points like a man / A gallant curtle-ax upon [her] thigh’, she wears a legal gown, possibly reverting to civilian dress for the very brief 4.2. Unlike Rosalind, Viola, Julia or Imogen, she does not don male attire to escape danger or find her true love, but only to participate in a legal proceeding—unlike the other heroines, she gets her man in the middle of the play, and no resourcefulness or bravery is required until she decides to help her new husband's friend out of trouble; until then, her role is entirely passive. Hence we can understand why Sarah Siddons thought her ‘a character in which it was not likely that I should excite any great sensation’, while Fanny Kemble noted that Portia ‘is not a part that is generally much liked by actresses, or that excited much enthusiasm in the public’.⁷⁸

Apart from being comparatively unexciting, there is also the fact that Portia is, in some respects, less than admirable. She is the chief agent of Shylock's downfall—after invalidating the bond through the ‘no jot of blood’ quibble, she unnecessarily (or so it seems) engages in a prosecution that quickly becomes a persecution: indeed, Ellen Terry notes, ‘whatever view one takes of it, it is impossible to admire it, although it may be defended on the ground that the end justifies the means’.⁷⁹

Before Terry, no actress advanced her career, or even made a lasting impression, as Portia. The great Shylocks who preceded Irving—Macklin, Cooke, Kean—played opposite any number of Portias, depending on when and where they happened to be doing the play, while Terry had the advantage of long-term employment in the Lyceum company. Also, the extent to which the text was cut in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries turned Portia into a relatively minor role: without Morocco and Arragon three scenes are gone, and gone along with them is any coherent treatment of the riddle of gold, silver and lead. Bassanio's casket scene was always much abbreviated, as was Act V, if Act V was played at all.

Helen Faucit's performance has probably received more attention than it deserves because of the notoriously negative review of the Irving production that appeared in Blackwood's (December 1879)—that the author was Blackwood's publisher Sir Theodore Martin, Faucit's husband, was an open secret. Martin deplored all the qualities Terry brought to the role in an implied, and at one point explicit, comparison with his now retired wife:⁸⁰ reading this review, one might think that Portia was an important part for Faucit, but Faucit spent only a few seasons with Macready, and Macready did not do the Merchant that often; most of her later career was in minor provincial companies. In 1867 she appeared in Manchester, and the North British Daily Mail was unimpressed, saying that the casket scene was ‘painful … bordering on the ridiculous’, adding that ‘Portia was never one of Miss Faucit's best characters, and she is now more than ever past looking the part’.⁸¹

Terry came to Portia with the advantage of being relatively young, twenty-eight, with a slim figure and great physical beauty. James Spedding (known primarily as an authority on Sir Francis Bacon) writes of her performance for the Bancrofts, ‘everything that she had to do seemed to come equally easy to her, and was done equally well; and the critic who would undertake to define the limits within which her power lies must be either very sagacious or very blind and deaf’.⁸²

Some of the cuts and rearrangements the Bancrofts made to the text would have been a help, not a hindrance, to Terry—indeed, Spedding observes that ‘the part of Portia is not a long one’. In this version, instead of first being ‘aweary of this great world’, Portia was thrust into the tension of Morocco's choice of caskets. Spedding admired ‘the reserved and stately courtesy with which she received the Prince of Morocco, and explained to him the conditions of his venture; her momentary flutter of alarm as he went to make his choice; her sudden relief, mixed with amusement, when he began by dismissing the leaden casket with contempt’.⁸³

Terry's brilliance was wasted opposite the quiet Shylock of Coghlan, but Henry Irving was looking for an Ophelia in 1878, and acting on the advice of his friends Sir Frederick and Lady Pollock, he engaged Terry. After her success in that part, and as Pauline in Lytton's ever-popular Lady of Lyons, Irving cast her as Portia, and the result was, in terms of longevity and audience approval, the most successful production ever of The Merchant of Venice.

So much has been written about the Lyceum Merchant, which opened on 1 November 1879, that only a few main points can be dealt with here—Irving's stage business is well recorded in reviews, biographies and other historical literature, and key moments, such as his famous ‘return’ to an empty house after Jessica's elopement, are described in the textual commentary.

Lyceum productions were highly regarded for the quality of their scenery, but the Merchant of 1879 was not particularly lavish, its total cost being only £1,200. As Irving's biographer August Brereton notes, the production was ‘a revelation, but it was made so by the intelligence and admirable acting, not, as some people seem to think … by the scenery’.⁸⁴ The story of how Irving decided to play Shylock after observing Levantine merchants while on a Mediterranean cruise is well known; it is also said that he went for a more dignified Jew because he knew how limited an actor he was, without the physical or vocal power of a Macklin or a Kemble. In a remarkably well-written review, the Spectator (8 November 1879) describes the qualities Irving brought to Shylock, and the social attitudes that articulate spectators brought to, and derived from, the performance:

Probably, to every mind, except that of Shakespeare himself—in which all potential interpretations of his Shylock, as all potential interpretations of his Hamlet, must have had a place—the complex image which Mr Irving, presented to a crowd more or less impressed with notions of their own concerning the Jew whom Shakespeare drew, was entirely novel and unexpected; for here is a man whom none can despise, who can raise emotions both of pity and of fear, and make us Christians thrill with a retrospective sense of shame. Here is an usurer indeed, but no more like the customary modern rendering of that extortionate lender of whom Bassanio borrowed ‘monies’, than the merchants dei Medici were like pawnbrokers down Whitechapel way; an usurer, indeed, and full of ‘thrift’, which is rather the protest of his disdain and disgust for the sensuality and frivolity of the ribald crew out of whom he makes his ‘Christian ducats’, than of his own sordidness … a Jew, in intellectual faculties, in spiritual discipline, far in advance of the time and the country in which he lives, shaken with strong passion sometimes, but for the most part fixed in a deep and weary disdain.

This Shylock is not from the world of Whitechapel pawnbrokers—in mentioning contemporary Jewish life, the critic instantly dismisses it as being of no relevance to the play. Irving is opposed to another Shylock, the presumed Shylock of two centuries ago, and it is in comparison with this Shylock that Irving can ‘make us Christians thrill with a retrospective sense of shame’.

While Irving played a fuller text than was customary at that time (he included Morocco but not Arragon), Portia's part was still heavily cut. What most endeared Terry to the audience, and offended the more conservative critics, was her beauty, her gaiety and the frankness with which she portrayed her sexual desire for Bassanio. Blackwood's was especially disapproving of how Terry held Bassanio

caressingly by the hand, nay, almost in an embrace, with all the unrestrained fondness which is conceivable only after he had actually won her … There is, altogether, a great deal too much of what Rosalind calls ‘a coming-on disposition’⁸⁵ in Miss Terry's bearing towards her lover. It is a general fault with her, but in Portia it is painfully out of place.

Terry's forwardness was also more than Henry James could cope with. To this ‘miserable little snob’,⁸⁶ as Theodore Roosevelt once called him, Terry

giggles too much, plays too much with her fingers, is too free and familiar, too osculatory, in her relations with Bassanio. The mistress of Belmont was a great lady, as well as a tender and clever woman; but this side of the part quite eludes the actress, whose deportment is not such as we should expect in the splendid spinster who has princes for wooers. When Bassanio has chosen the casket which contains the key of her heart, she approaches him, and begins to pat and stroke him. This seems to us an appallingly false note, ‘Good heavens, she's touching him!’ a person sitting next to us exclaimed—a person whose judgment in such matters is always unerring.

James's ‘unerring’ judge was the former Portia, Fanny Kemble.⁸⁷

AFTER IRVING

The Lyceum production marks a major turning point in the history of the Merchant: Irving joined Macklin, Cooke and Kean as a Shylock against whom future performers would be measured, and for the first time Portia attracted considerable notice. This was as true in the United States as it was in England, since Irving's company made no less than six American tours between 1883 and 1903.

One nearly immediate effect of Irving's success was that the play would no longer be acceptable without Act V. When Lawrence Barrett staged the Merchant in 1886, using his friend Edwin Booth's text, Shakespeariana's critic complained, ‘The charming fifth act, which so ideally and joyously rounds out the comedy, is altogether cut, and only a ragged here and there, and a consciousness of inconsequence, in scenes not wholly dedicated to the Jew, remain vaguely to remind us of the perfect whole we miss.’⁸⁸

Booth and Barrett jointly mounted a new Merchant in the following season, and 5.1 was restored, the newly executed set revealing, as described in the Philadelphia Item, Jessica and Lorenzo in a ‘dreamy Italian garden by moonlight, with rose-colored lamps and twinkling stars’.⁸⁹ They went to great lengths to ensure that the other sets, too, would outdo anything yet seen in America: Act I showed ‘the Piazzetta of St Mark along the south side of the Palace of the Doges, whose columned facade filled the side of the stage to the audience's right’, and for Act II Shylock's house stood beside a bridge spanning a canal, high enough so that a gondola could pass underneath with its gondolier standing.⁹⁰ The beautiful Polish actress Helena Modjeska, who had great success as Ophelia, was their Portia. Her performance was distinguished by the quiet earnestness with which she delivered the ‘mercy’ speech.⁹¹

As noted, Booth's Shylock was a much darker character than Irving's, and some of the stage business in his promptbooks is reminiscent of Victorian melodrama. He was not unaware that his performance might be seen as a libel against the Jewish people, but like many an actor after him, he believed that to play Shylock essentially as a villain was to remain faithful to Shakespeare's intention, however problematic that might be to modern sentiments. He once wrote to Richard Mansfield, another notable Shylock, ‘it is not easy to estimate how much the antipathies to the Jewish race have been sharpened by those portrayals of the wolf-like ferocity of the one great figure that typifies the spirit of usury’.⁹²

Mansfield, an accomplished musician as well as a versatile actor, played only a few Shakespearean leads in a career cut short by an early death; his great successes were as Jekyll/Hyde in a stage adaptation of Stevenson's tale, and as Cyrano de Bergerac. The story of Mansfield's Merchant is a strange one:⁹³ while on his third American tour of 1887-8, Henry Irving saw Mansfield perform, and was so impressed that he invited him to appear for a season at the Lyceum, a season that unfortunately did not prove to be a success. Mansfield ended up owing Irving a large amount of money, and subsequently developed an irrational and obsessive hatred of his erstwhile friend—when he came to play Shylock in 1893, opposite his wife Beatrice Cameron as Portia, Mansfield most wanted to better Irving, about to embark on another American tour, by returning to the ‘true’ Shylock of Shakespeare. He wrote to William Winter, ‘I shall make Shylock what Shakespeare evidently intended: a hotblooded, revengeful & rapacious Oriental Jew.’ Winter then praised Mansfield's interpretation for having ‘brought into the strongest relief the craft and wickedness of his motives, the malignity of his hatred, and the deadly determination of his passion for revenge’, but the production played to poor houses in Chicago, where Irving had been a short time previously. Mansfield blamed Winter: ‘Damn your criticisms! … I had a deuce of a time getting our only patrons, the Jews, to come and see The Merchant, because you made me out a fiend and a vulture.’⁹⁴

More successful in post-Irving America was Augustin Daly, one of the most powerful managers of the century, known especially for bringing elaborate spectacle to his productions of Shakespeare. Daly's first encounter with the Merchant was in 1875, and he followed the (by then) traditional pattern of a rearranged text to allow for scenic tableaux. Towse thought that the ‘the rich dressing and picturesque setting’ made ‘small amends for the irreverent and often incapable treatment of the text’,⁹⁵ but he admired the Shylock of E. L. Davenport:

He surpassed Edwin Booth in range, though inferior to him in subtlety and electrical tragic inspiration. His Jew was a forceful and consistent study, masterful, keen, with a note of menace in its sarcastic self-control. He was intense rather than tempestuous, and tore no passion to tatters … the concentrated, cool, and deadly purpose of his acting in the court scene was appalling, and his final collapse a tragic picture of blank and irremediable despair.⁹⁶

Twenty-three years later Daly chose The Merchant of Venice for what was to be his last and most sumptuous Shakespearean production. Unlike his previous effort, this was after Irving's American tours and the Booth/Barrett revival, and Daly was determined to surpass them. Venice was prettified—Shylock's house, ‘mouldy and crumbling’ in Booth and Barrett's production, was gaily painted and covered with roses, and there were more extras providing atmosphere than had ever been seen in the Merchant.⁹⁷ Apart from the scenery, Daly's leading lady, Ada Rehan, was the only real attraction—Sidney Herbert was too limited and inexperienced an actor to succeed Davenport, and Daly's last production was not one of his triumphs.⁹⁸

The Shylock of Scottish-born Robert Mantell, an audience favourite in a variety of heroic roles, would have been more important had he been able to play New York in his prime, but he had to remain outside the state because of a pending arrest warrant for failing to meet alimony payments. His Hamlet and Othello were a hit with the public, but received only guarded approval from the critics, due to his tendency to over-act in the more passionate scenes. One would expect that these excesses would be even worse as Shylock, but to Mantell's credit, he gave a controlled performance, moving William Edgett to write in the Boston Evening Transcript, ‘so perfect is his command of himself that he is able to give a quiet and downright restrained earnestness to the single phrase, “I am a Jew”, in the midst of a long speech that is aflame with uninterrupted passion and pathos’.⁹⁹

Even when allowing for the varying perceptions of individual critics, around the turn of the century we see a definite pattern emerging in American attitudes to the way Shylock should be played. Irving still cast a long shadow over his successors, who found themselves hard-pressed to place their own stamp on the role: Mansfield and Sothern, in presenting a physically unpleasant and undignified Shylock, received little approval for their efforts, while Mantell earned respect for his restraint. …

Notes

1. Bloom, Shakespeare, pp. 171-2.

2. Foakes and Rickert, Henslowe's Diary, p. 255.

3. Calendar of State Papers, pp. 90-6, 453-62.

4. Berek, ‘The Jew as Renaissance Man’, pp. 149-53; D. Katz, Jews, pp. 90-6.

5. Gross, Shylock, pp. 16-17. For a more detailed argument denying that Shylock conformed to a stereotype, see Edelman, ‘Which is the Jew’.

6. Baum, ‘Judas's Red Hair’, p. 520.

7. Collier, Memoirs of the Principal Actors, p. 53.

8. Stoll, Shakespeare Studies, p. 255.

9. Chambers and Pullan, Venice, pp. 338-49. In a 1977 article, Brian Pullan finds little trace of popular resentment against Jews in Renaissance Venice, and where it did exist, it seems to have been amongst Greeks or other minorities, not Italians (Pullan, ‘A Ship with Two Rudders’, p. 54).

10. Roth, Venice, p. 116.

11. Jones, God and the Moneylenders, pp. 78, 144 ff.

12. Honigmann, ‘World Elsewhere’, pp. 41-5; Honigmann, Shakespeare's Impact, pp. 8-14.

13. Furness, A New Variorum Edition, p. 449.

14. Rubinstein, History of the Jews, pp. 44-5.

15. Ibid., p. 62.

16. D. Katz, Jews, p. 157.

17. In the 1680s Ashkenazi immigration to England increased, and by 1690 enough German Jews lived in London for them to form their own independent community. The first Ashkenazi synagogue, later known as the Great Synagogue, was founded in Duke's Place in 1690. In 1695 the London census showed 853 Jewish names, 255 (30 per cent) of them Ashkenazi (Rubinstein, History of the Jews, p. 61).

18. See Halio, Merchant, pp. 61-2.

19. Hoppit, Land of Liberty, p. 4.

20. Biographical Dictionary.

21. Gross, Shylock, pp. 91-2.

22. Dobson, ‘Improving on the Original’, p. 64.

23. London Stage, pt. 3, p. cx.

24. Gentleman, Dramatic Censor, p. 292.

25. Biographical Dictionary.

26. Gentleman, Dramatic Censor, p. 297.

27. Odell, Shakespeare, p. 15.

28. Williams, Shakespeare on the German Stage, p. 133. I am very much indebted to Williams's magisterial study.

29. Bruford, Theatre Drama, p. 34.

30. Ibid., pp. 255, 302.

31. Banham, Cambridge Guide, p. 470.

32. Häublein, ‘Ein Stück’, p. 37.

33. Williams, Shakespeare on the German Stage, p. 135.

34. Devrient, Geschichte, vol. I, p. 525.

35. This was not Kemble's first attempt at the part—he did it at Smock Alley, Dublin, and for his London debut in January, 1784.

36. Gentleman, Dramatic Censor, p. 293.

37. See Appendix 1.

38. Hare, George Frederick Cooke, p. 113.

39. He had appeared in London before, at the Little Theatre, Haymarket, in 1778.

40. Hare, George Frederick Cooke, p. 119.

41. Odell, Annals., pp. 359-60.

42. qtd Cornwall, Life of Edmund Kean, p. 219.

43. Hawkins, Life of Edmund Kean, vol. I, p. 126.

44. Lelyveld, Shylock on the Stage, p. 42.

45. qtd Bate, The Romantics on Shakespeare, p. 160.

46. Shattuck, American Stage, vol. I, p. 50.

47. qtd Bate, The Romantics on Shakespeare, p. 201.

48. Hazlitt, View of the English Stage, p. 179.

49. Ibid., p. 296.

50. Ibid., pp. 323-4.

51. Gross, Shylock, p. 107.

52. Bate, ‘Romantic Stage’, p. 107.

53. Ibid., p. 108.

54. Williams, Shakespeare on the German Stage, p. 137.

55. Ibid., pp. 137-8.

56. Williams, German Actors, p. 85.

57. Beatty-Kingston, ‘Shylock in Germany’, p. 87.

58. Faucit's Portia is discussed further, p. 22.

59. Odell, Shakespeare p. 227.

60. In Shakespeare and the Jews, Shapiro questions the conclusions of Katz and other historians (see above, p. 6), who regard this time as one of improvement for England's Jews, as ‘wishful thinking’ (p. 193). But Shapiro's own use of incidents such as the Jew Bill of 1753 as proof of pervasive anti-Semitism is equally questionable.

61. Rubinstein, History of the Jews, p. 69.

62. Cole, Life of Charles Kean, pp. 264-5. One of the flower-girls was the ten-year-old Ellen Terry.

63. Ewbank, ‘European Cross Currents’, p. 133.

64. Atkinson, Broadway, p. 91.

65. Winter, Shakespeare on the Stage, pp. 163-4.

66. Towse, Sixty Years, p. 189.

67. Schildkraut, My Father, pp. 40-1.

68. qtd Williams, German Actors, p. 132.

69. Williams, Shakespeare on the German Stage, pp. 145-6.

70. Jackson, ‘Actor-Managers’, p. 115.

71. Bancroft, Bancrofts, p. 226.

72. Ibid., p. 227.

73. Scott, Drama of Yesterday and Today, p. 583.

74. Tree, Thoughts, p. 44.

75. Scott, Drama of Yesterday and Today, p. 188.

76. Tree, Thoughts, p. 44.

77. See Hankey, ‘Victorian Portias’, p. 433.

78. qtd ibid., p. 434.

79. Terry, Four Lectures, p. 121.

80. See pp. 25, 192, 234.

81. qtd Carlisle, Helen Faucit, pp. 218-19.

82. Spedding, Reviews and Discussions, p. 361.

83. Ibid.

84. Brereton, Life of Henry Irving, vol. II, p. 301.

85. As You Like It, 4.1.112-13.

86. qtd Cunliffe, Literature of the United States, p. 258.

87. James, Scenic Art, pp. xviii, 143.

88. ‘The Drama’, pp. 523, 524.

89. qtd Shattuck, Amer.II, pp. 48-9.

90. Ibid., p. 48.

91. See p. 223.

92. Shattuck, Amer.II, p. 50.

93. For a fuller account see ibid., pp. 211-25.

94. Ibid., pp. 217-18.

95. Towse, Sixty Years, p. 130.

96. Ibid., p. 131.

97. Shattuck, Amer.II, pp. 92-3.

98. Photographs of Augustin Daly's sets for his last great Shakespearean revival of 1898 are in ibid.

99. 7 March 1907, qtd ibid., p. 239.

Bibliography

Editions

Bawcutt, N. W., ed. The Jew of Malta. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1978.

Furness, H. H. A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1888.

Granville, George. The Jew of Venice. London: 1701.

Standard Reference Works

A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers & Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660-1800. Ed. Philip H. Highfill, Jr, Kalman A. Burnim and Edward A. Langhans. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973-8.

Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, Of the Reign of Elizabeth, 1591-4. Nendeln: Kraus, 1967.

The London Stage, 1660-1800: A calendar of plays, entertainments & afterpieces, together with casts, box-receipts and contemporary comment / Compiled from the playbills, newspapers and theatrical diaries of the period. 5 pts. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1960-8.

Other Works: Printed

Atkinson, Brooks. Broadway. London: Cassell, 1971.

Bancroft, Marie and Squire. The Bancrofts: Recollections of Sixty Years. London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1911.

Banham, Martin, ed. Cambridge Guide to World Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Bate, Jonathan. The Romantics on Shakespeare. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992.

Baum, Paul Franklinn. ‘Judas's Red Hair’. Journal of English and Germanic Philology 21 (1922): 520-9.

Beatty-Kingston, William. ‘Shylock in Germany’. The Theatre 1 (1880): 17-20, 86-90.

Berek, Peter. ‘The Jew as Renaissance Man’. Renaissance Quarterly 51 (1998): 128-62.

Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. London: Fourth Estate, 1999.

Brereton, Austin. The Life of Henry Irving. 2 vols. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1908.

Bruford, W. H. Theatre Drama and Audience in Goethe's Germany. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1950.

Carlisle, Carol Jones. Helen Faucit: Fire and Ice on the Victorian Stage. London: Society for Theatre Research, 2000.

Chambers, David and Brian Pullan, eds. Venice: A Documentary History, 1450-1630. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.

Cole, John William. The Life and Theatrical Times of Charles Kean, F.S.A., vol. II [1859]. New York: Garland, 1986.

Collier, J. Payne. Memoirs of the Principal Actors in the Plays of Shakespeare. London: Shakespeare Society, 1846.

[Cornwall, Barry]. The Life of Edmund Kean. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1835.

Cunliffe, Marcus. The Literature of the United States. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967.

Devrient, Eduard. Geschichte der Deutschen Schauspielkunst, vol. I. Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1967.

Dobson, Michael. ‘Improving on the Original: Actresses and Adaptations’. In Shakespeare: An Illustrated Stage History. Ed. Jonathan Bate and Russell Jackson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Ewbank, Inga-Stina. ‘European Cross Currents: Ibsen and Brech’. In Shakespeare: An Illustrated Stage History. Ed. Jonathan Bate and Russell Jackson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Foakes, R. A. and R. T. Rickert, ed. Henslowe's Diary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961.

Gentleman, Francis. The Dramatic Censor, or Critical Companion. 2 vols. London: J. Bell, 1770.

Gross, John. Shylock: Four Hundred Years in the Life of a Legend. New York: Vintage, 1994.

Halio, Jay L., introd. The Merchant of Venice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Hankey, Julie. ‘Victorian Portias: Shakespeare's Borderline Heroine’. Shakespeare Quarterly 45 (1994): 426-48.

Hare, Arnold. George Frederick Cooke: The Actor and the Man. London: Society for Theatre Research, 1980.

Häublein, Renata. ‘Ein Stück, gemacht, um, den Charakter des Juden in's Licht zu setzen': Die Mannheimer Kauffmann von Venedig-Bearbeitung von 1783’. Shakespeare Jahrbuch 137 (2001): 23-37.

Hawkins, Frederick William. The Life of Edmund Kean. 2 vols. London: Tinsley Brothers, 1969.

Hazlitt, William. A View of the English Stage. Ed. W. Spencer Jackson. London: Bell, 1906.

Honigmann, E. A. J. ‘“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: University of Delaware Press, 1986.

Hoppit, Julian. A Land of Liberty?: England 1689-1727. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000.

Jackson, Russell. ‘Actor-Managers and the Spectacular’. In Shakespeare: An Illustrated Stage History. Ed. Jonathan Bate and Russell Jackson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

James, Henry. The Scenic Art: Notes on Acting and the Drama. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1949.

Jones, Eldred D. The Elizabethan Image of Africa. Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1971.

Katz, David S. The Jews in the History of England 1485-1850. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.

Lelyveld, Toby. Shylock on the Stage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961.

Odell, George C. D. Annals of the New York Stage. 15 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 1927-49.

———. Shakespeare from Betterton to Irving. 2 vols. New York: Dover, 1966.

Roth, Cecil. Venice. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1930. A History of the Jews in England. 3rd edn. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964.

Rubinstein, W. D. A History of the Jews in the English-Speaking World: Great Britain. Houndmills, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1996.

Scott, Clement. The Drama of Yesterday and Today. Vol. I [1899]. New York: Garland, 1986.

Shapiro, James. Shakespeare and the Jews. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.

Shattuck, Charles H. Shakespeare on the American Stage: From the Hallams to Edwin Booth. Washington: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1976.

Spedding, James. Reviews and Discussions, Literary, Political and Historical. London: C. Kegan Paul, 1879.

Stoll, E. E. Shakespeare Studies. New York: Stechert, 1942.

Terry, Ellen. Four Lectures on Shakespeare. London: Martin Hopkinson, 1932.

Towse, John Ranken. Sixty Years of the Theater: An Old Critic's Memories. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1916.

Tree, Herbert Beerbohm. Thoughts and After-Thoughts. London: Cassell, 1915.

Williams, Simon. German Actors of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: Idealism, Romanticism, and Realism. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985.

———. Shakespeare on the German Stage, Volume I: 1586-1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Winter, William. Shakespeare on the Stage: First Series. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1969.