SOURCE: Halio, Jay L., ed. Introduction to The Merchant of Venice, by William Shakespeare, pp. 1-84. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.

[In the following excerpt, Halio addresses Shakespeare's attitude toward Jews, a source of considerable controversy surrounding the representation of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice.]

Any approach to understanding Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice inevitably includes a discussion of the vexed question of its alleged anti-Semitism. This Introduction to the play therefore confronts the question directly, focusing on the background against which the play must be considered and a comparison with another play famous, or infamous, for its portrayal of a Jew, Marlowe's The Jew of Malta. From thence a discussion of the Merchant's [The Merchant of Venice] more immediate sources and its date continues, followed by a detailed analysis of the play itself, which emphasizes its ambiguities, inconsistencies, and internal contradictions. This discussion naturally leads into a survey of the play's performance history, particularly its representation of the dominant character, Shylock, and the major ways he has been portrayed. The Introduction concludes with a discussion of the text and the editorial procedures followed in this edition.

SHAKESPEARE AND SEMITISM

Shakespeare's attitude toward Jews, specifically in The Merchant of Venice, has been the cause of unending controversy. Recognizing the problem, in the Stratford-upon-Avon season of 1987 the Royal Shakespeare Company performed The Merchant of Venice back-to-back with a production of Marlowe's The Jew of Malta.¹The Jew of Malta, played as a very broad heroic comedy, was evidently intended to contrast with Shakespeare's play and disarm criticism, such as the RSC had experienced earlier, in 1983, with a less successful production of The Merchant. To reinforce the new strategy, Antony Sher, a South African Jew, was cast as Shylock.² It almost worked, but not quite. Sher was largely a sympathetic Shylock, with swastikas and other anti-Semitic slurs used to underscore the money-lender as victim; however, the trial scene portrayed Shylock as extremely bloodthirsty. Interpolating some extra-Shakespearian stage business, borrowed from the Passover Haggadah, the RSC and Sher indicated that cutting Antonio's pound of flesh was tantamount to a religious ritual of human sacrifice. Of course, nothing could be further from Jewish religious practice or principles, the aborted sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22 being the archetype of Jewish opposition to human sacrifice.³ In the event, Antony Sher's Shylock was not far removed from Alun Armstrong's Barabas.

Looking closely at both Marlowe's play and Shakespeare's will clarify the attitudes towards Semitism in those dramas, but the background against which both were conceived is also important. Jews had been officially banished from England since the Expulsion of 1290 by King Edward I, but the eviction was not quite so thoroughgoing as was hoped. A few Jews, whether converts or not, remained in England in the intervening period before Oliver Cromwell invited them to return in the seventeenth century. There is sufficient evidence for this assertion, but whether Shakespeare or Marlowe actually knew any Jews may be irrelevant.⁴ In their plays they wrote not from personal experience but from a tradition that had evolved both in England and on the Continent of the Jew as alien, usurer, member of a race maudite.⁵ In Marlowe's case, the tradition of the amoral machiavel was even more important than that of the money-lender.

In these post-Holocaust days, it may be difficult for us to conceive how Jews were regarded and treated in Europe, including England, during the Middle Ages. They had few rights and could not claim inalienable citizenship in any country. Typically, they depended upon rulers of the realm for protection and such rights as they might enjoy. In the thirteenth century in England, for example, under Henry III and Edward I, they were tantamount to the king's chattel. The king could—and did—dispose of them and their possessions entirely as he chose. Heavy talladges, or taxes, were imposed upon Jews—individually and collectively—to support the sovereign's financial needs, and when the moneys were not forthcoming, imprisonment and/or confiscation usually followed. At the same time, the Church vigorously opposed the existence of Jews in the country, but as they were under the king's protection the Church was powerless to do more than excite popular feeling against them.

Contrary to common belief, not all Jews were money-lenders, although usury was one of the few means to accumulate such wealth as they had. Many Jews were poor and served in humble, even menial capacities.⁶ But as non-believers in Christ, they were a despised people, however useful, financially and otherwise (as doctors, for instance). Near the end of the thirteenth century, when Edward had practically bankrupted his Jews, who found it impossible to meet his increasingly exorbitant demands for payments, the king decided to play his last card—expulsion. This act was not only satisfying to the Church, but it provided the king with the last bit of income from that once profitable source. Since everything the Jews owned belonged to the king, including the debts owed them as money-lenders or pawnbrokers, the king became the beneficiary of those debts as well as everything else of value. Although Edward relieved the debtors of the interest on their loans and made some other concessions, he hoped to realize a sizeable amount of money eventually, however much he might later regret the termination—forever?—of this once lucrative source of income.⁷

Doubtless, some Jews preferred conversion to expulsion in England, as later in Spain under the Inquisition, and they took shelter in the Domus conversorum, the House of Converts. This institution dates from the early thirteenth century and was an effort by the Dominicans, assisted by the king, to convert Jews to Christianity. The Domus conversorum in what is now Chancery Lane in London lasted well into the eighteenth century. Although at times few if any converts of Jewish birth lived there, in the centuries following 1290 it sheltered several from Exeter, Oxford, Woodstock, Northampton, Bury St Edmunds, Norwich, Bristol, as well as London and elsewhere where Jews had lived before being expelled.⁸ After the Expulsion, some Jews entered the realm for one reason or another, either as travellers and merchants, as refugees from Spain and Portugal, or as invited professionals, such as the physicians who treated Henry IV in his illness and the engineer, Joachim Gaunse, who helped found the mining industry in Wales in the sixteenth century.⁹ Small settlements of Marranos, or crypto-Jews, can be traced in London and Bristol during the reigns of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I.¹⁰

But if Jews were scarce and those few who remained were forbidden to practise their religion openly, they were not forgotten, either in history or legend, and certainly not in the popular imagination, as ballads and other literature indicate.¹¹ As mystery plays grew and flourished, Old and New Testament stories were dramatized, with Jews occupying a prominent place in both. One recent scholar has suggested that the contrast between the biblical Jews of the Old Testament and those of the New Testament, particularly in plays dealing with the Crucifixion and events leading up to it, resulted in a ‘dual image’ of the Jew. On the one hand, ‘he excites horror, fear, hatred; but he also excites wonder, awe, and love’.¹² The examples of Judas and the Pharisees in the Corpus Christi plays must have supported common belief in the Jew as an incarnation of the devil;¹³ on the other hand, the patriarchs, Moses, Daniel, the prophets, and other figures appear as heroes, symbols or presentiments of patience, constancy, and other Christian virtues.¹⁴ Moreover, Christian theology, as represented in the epistles of St Paul, as in Romans 11 for example, argues for the redemption of Israel through conversion to Christianity. The Jews of post-biblical history, therefore, must be present not only ‘as witness to the final consummation of the Christian promise of salvation’, but as a participant in it.¹⁵ If Jews were shunned as a pariah race, they also had to be preserved for the ultimate Christian fulfilment; hence, the ‘dual image’, and the dialectic of Christian thought and feeling regarding them.

The significance of this twofold attitude, and of historical actions against Jews in England and elsewhere, is apparent in The Merchant of Venice. Earlier, it appears in such works as the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, written in the latter half of the fifteenth century. Its principal character is Aristorius, a Sicilian merchant with connections all over the known world, from Antioch to Holland, and from the Brabant to Turkey. Jonathas, a wealthy Jew, approaches him intent on testing the efficacy of the Holy Sacrament, in which he utterly disbelieves. Only the riches he has acquired—gold and precious gems—mean anything to him. Jonathas bribes Aristorius with a hundred pounds to steal the holy wafer from the church and give it to him, whereupon miraculous events occur. When he and his four compatriots strike the Host with their daggers (a re-enactment of the Crucifixion), it begins to bleed. Jonathas picks it up and tries to put it in a cauldron of boiling oil, but it sticks to his hand and he is unable to get free of it. In the succeeding comic turmoil, Jonathas loses his hand; the water in the cauldron turns to blood after the Host and his hand are thrown into it; and when the Host is finally removed and thrown into a hot oven, the oven bursts, bleeding from its cracks, and an image of the crucified Christ emerges. A dialogue, in English and Latin, ensues between the image, Jonathas, and the others, in which Jesus sorrowfully asks why they torment him still and refuse to believe in what he has taught:

Why blaspheme yow me? Why do ye thus?
Why put yow me to a newe tormentry?
And I dyed for yow on the crosse!(16)

The Jews are contrite and repent, converting to Christianity; whereupon Jonathas's hand is restored and Aristorius, abjectly penitent, is absolved from his sin.

The representation of the Jew in this fifteenth-century miracle play combines the attributes of physical mutilation (blood sacrifice) and commercial malpractice, as Edgar Rosenberg remarks.¹⁷ But beneath its obviously broad comedy, it also shows a strong impulse on the part of the unknown playwright to encourage regeneration through conversion. Later, in Robert Wilson's play, The Three Ladies of London (1584), the Jew Gerontus appears as the hero and Mercadore, an Italian merchant, is the comic villain who speaks in broken English and is willing to embrace Islam rather than pay Gerontus the debt he owes him. In the event, Gerontus prefers to surrender the debt obligation so that Mercadore will not be driven to apostasy, but even so Mercadore is unrepentant, and both are finally brought before an upright judge, who passes appropriate sentence.

Generous Gerontus, however, is hardly typical of the Jewish stereotype in Elizabethan literature. The scoundrels Zadoch and Zachary in Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller (1594) are much more like what we might expect, or the Jewish apothecary who poisons Bajazeth and Aga in The Tragical Reign of Selimus (1594). These and other comic villains may owe something to the notoriety caused by the trial and execution in 1594 of Roderigo Lopez, the Portuguese convert, who had been Queen Elizabeth's physician.¹⁸ They may also owe a good deal to Marlowe's Barabas, the protagonist of The Jew of Malta (c.1589), a direct descendant of the vice figure in the morality plays¹⁹ as well as the villainous Jews of the mystery and miracle plays. By a stroke of genius, Marlowe combined these elements with the popular conception of the Italian machiavel to produce the comic and heroic villainy of Barabas, a major dramatic figure and an extraordinarily powerful one.

While all three aspects of his character are important, Barabas as a comic machiavel emerges as the dominant one, suggested from the start when Barabas's opening soliloquy immediately follows Machiavel's prologue. Usury, so often associated with Jews, is not nearly as significant as Barabas's evident delight in his multifarious scheming. Owing loyalty to no one—not even, finally, his daughter Abigail—he proceeds despite setbacks to confound his enemies, until he ultimately and comically overreaches himself; or rather, until his enemies, Ferneze, the governor of Malta, and his knights surpass his treachery. For neither the Christians nor the Jews nor the Turks who threaten Malta emerge as the moral centre of this play, which instead substitutes wit and the ability to implement ‘policy’ as the controlling force. ‘Marlowe is not finally interested, as Shakespeare is’, Rosenberg says, ‘in questions which touch deeply on the nature of justice, is even less interested in legalistic quibbles; he enjoys the spectacle of these depraved noblemen of passion trying to cut each other's throats’ (pp. 20-1).

But what of Barabas's Jewishness and its role in the drama? As an alien figure, an outsider, the Jew might be associated with the amoral machiavel, except that Jews, as representative of the Old Testament, had a strict moral code of their own. In his references to the patriarchs and biblical story, Barabas confirms his Jewish heritage, but in the process he comically perverts it. For example, he equates the riches he has acquired with the blessings promised to the Jews (1.1.101-4).²⁰ When threatened with a tax needed to pay the Turkish tribute—a tax reminiscent of Edward I's ‘talladges’—Barabas does not seek refuge in conversion to Christianity; but his hesitation results in confiscation of his wealth. Only his craftiness in hiding the better part of his fortune prevents complete destitution. His revenge later is to have the governor's son killed in a duel with his daughter's rival suitor, Mathias—the start of a series of murders and atrocities accomplished through duplicity and deception that characterize the hero-villain.

Duplicity and deception provide the link between Barabas's Jewishness and Machiavellism, at least in the popular imagination to which Marlowe appealed. Barabas implies the connection in his soliloquy brooding upon Ferneze's unjust confiscation of his property:

I am not of the tribe of Levi, I,
That can so soon forget an injury.
We Jews can fawn like spaniels when we please,
And when we grin, we bite; yet are our looks
As innocent and harmless as a lamb's.
I learned in Florence how to kiss my hand,
Heave up my shoulders when they call me dog,
And duck as low as any barefoot friar,
Hoping to see them starve upon a stall. …

(2.3.18-26)

Florence, of course, was Machiavelli's city. Unlike Venice, it was not known for harbouring many Jews. The soliloquy occurs shortly before Barabas purchases the slave Ithamore, a Turk who rivals him in treachery, especially directed against Christians (see 2.3.171-212). Since Marlowe includes Christian treachery as well in his play, most prominently at the end, it is clear that he enjoys attacking hypocritical professors of all three major religions, not solely the Jewish machiavel.

Shakespeare also attacks Christian hypocrisy, as modern commentators have frequently noted, specifically in Shylock's speech on Christian slave-holding (4.1.89-99).²¹ But the conception of Shylock is altogether different from Marlowe's Barabas, notwithstanding the fact that both authors drew upon the same historical and literary backgrounds. Whereas Marlowe seems intent on a virtuoso display of comic villainy, with little regard for serious or deep character motives after Acts 1 and 2, Shakespeare concentrates upon Shylock's complex nature and the relationships of justice and mercy that lie at the heart of his play. If Shylock is another version of the villainous Jewish money-lender, and like Barabas a comic villain, he is also something more—the first stage Jew in English drama who is multi-dimensional and thus made to appear human.

Scholars, including myself, have looked elsewhere in Shakespeare's work for references to Jews and from them to discover more about his attitude. The references, such as those in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 1 Henry IV, and Macbeth, are hardly complimentary, though usually offhandedly remarked and consistent with the dramatic character. The references in Love's Labour's Lost, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Much Ado About Nothing, on the other hand, are clearly humorous ones, depending in part on word-play to gain effect.²² No allusions at all appear in the poems or sonnets. Anti-Semitic slurs thus do not appear to be important in Shakespeare's vocabulary or his thinking, with the outstanding exception of The Merchant of Venice. There, in the view of some critics, Shakespeare unleashed a venomous attack upon Jews—not only money-lenders and usurers, but all Jews.²³ To cite only one piece of evidence, Shylock is rarely referred to by name; instead, he is typically referred to or addressed as ‘Jew’, a term then as now (in some quarters) of considerable contempt.²⁴

Despite this fact, or rather in addition to it, complicating Shakespeare's attitude and our understanding of it, are other aspects of Shylock's character. These have enabled some actors, notably Henry Irving and Laurence Olivier, to portray Shylock as sympathetic, someone more sinned against than sinning, in short a tragic figure. A certain amount of textual adaptation, such as cutting Shylock's long aside, ‘How like a fawning publican he looks. / I hate him for he is a Christian’, etc. (1.3.38-49), is of course essential for this interpretation, although the dramatist otherwise endowed his comic villain with sufficient depth to permit the tragic emphasis. But it needs to be stressed that despite Shylock's depths, his very human traits,²⁵ Shakespeare's initial conception of him was essentially as a comic villain, most likely adorned with a red wig and beard and a bottle nose, but not a middle-European accent.²⁶

The evidence for Shylock as a comic villain is partly in the literary and dramatic traditions, which Shakespeare followed, that lie behind the character, and partly in certain generic and other considerations.²⁷ Romantic comedy, as Shakespeare developed the genre, is not without its darker elements, as Hero's denunciation and assumed death in Much Ado About Nothing clearly demonstrate and as, in a play closer to the Merchant, some aspects of A Midsummer Night's Dream also reveal.²⁸ Into this side of romantic comedy falls Shylock's design against Antonio's life. But the comic element also includes Antonio's hairbreadth escape. Legalistic quibbling over the validity of the bond, or Portia's arguments opposing, is not of paramount concern: Shylock's defeat is another in a long series going back beyond Barabas's descent into the cauldron—an example of ‘the biter bit’, a joke Elizabethans loved almost as much as jokes about cuckoldry. As for Shylock's conversion, we need only note that it was accepted as the alternative to something that, sinfully, Shylock thought would be worse. It could have been regarded by Elizabethan audiences (unlike those since then) as evidence of Antonio's Christian charity to Shylock—a mercy, combined with his request that Shylock be spared from destitution, entirely consonant with Portia's exhortations to Shylock earlier in the trial scene. In this way, the shallowness of Shylock's Judaism contrasts strikingly with the depth of Antonio's magnanimity and, before his, the Duke's spontaneous charity.²⁹

But is Shylock worth saving? Apart from the consideration that every human soul is precious, does Shylock earn any serious sympathy that may lead us to rejoice in his salvation—such as it is? In spurning Shylock, Antonio and others, particularly Graziano, simultaneously spurn both his business and his religion; for in their minds—as in most Elizabethans'—usury and Jewishness were interlocked.³⁰ They thus provide Shylock with his deep resentment and the motivation for his revenge. Heaping injury upon insult, Jessica's elopement with Lorenzo, accompanied by bags of ducats and jewels, further exacerbates Shylock's bitter resentment. When news that Antonio's ships have miscarried reaches him at the moment of his agony over Jessica's actions, Shylock is more than ever prepared for a vicious counter-attack. His intention to hold Antonio to his bond and its penalty comes precisely when Salerio and Solanio taunt him unmercifully (3.1.21-49). True, Jessica later claims that Shylock always meant to undo Antonio if he could (3.2.282-8), but in the dramatic structure of the play, the impulse to revenge comes just here, where it is most powerfully motivated.³¹ And it is through this motivation and the circumstances immediately surrounding it as much as anything else that Shylock's essential human quality emerges, just as Hamlet's action in the prayer scene—his lust for vengeance against Claudius—makes him not nobler but more human.³²

Our response to Shylock, then, must be measured accordingly. Norman Rabkin is among the few critics who remind us that the scene with Salerio and Solanio involves the audience in a congeries of emotions so complex and contradictory that it is impossible to maintain a simple, single response to Shylock's behaviour. At once humorous, pathetic, antagonizing, Shylock's reaction to the news of his daughter's elopement, her theft, Antonio's misfortune, Jessica's squandering of his prized possessions parallels the similar situation in the Boar's Head scene in 1 Henry IV where Falstaff makes his apologia pro vita sua (2.5.421-86).³³ If we are true to our experience of character and events, then no simplistic, reductivist description can appear accurate. Moreover, in subsequent scenes, our response to Shylock will be affected, or it ought to be, by an understanding not only of his position, but of his frame of mind, including the kinds of emotion his experience generates. That Shylock is hell-bent, literally, upon his revenge against Antonio should then hardly surprise us. Everything considered, his attitude and actions appear those of a man seriously deranged by what he, rightly or wrongly, regards as an enormous injustice against him personally and, through him, the people he represents.³⁴ Is it any wonder, then, that Shylock remains intransigent, impervious to Portia's appeals to mercy in the trial scene?

In this and other ways …, Shakespeare reveals his attitude toward Shylock. It is ambivalent, far more than Marlowe's attitude toward Barabas. But in neither author can we confidently proclaim an anti-Semitic bias that is more than abstract and traditional. For Marlowe, the machiavel was more significant than Barabas's Judaism, which merged with it. By contrast, in developing Shylock's character in depth, and endowing it with vivid attitudes and emotions, Shakespeare succeeded in creating a dramatic figure who arouses far deeper feelings than Barabas can. Whereas the one remains, first and last, a comic stage villain, however brilliant and quick-witted, the other transcends the type, shatters the conventional image with his appeal to our common humanity, and leaves us unsettled in our prejudices, disturbed in our emotions, and by no means sure of our convictions. …

Notes

1. The Merchant was performed on the main stage, with The Jew at the Swan Theatre.

2. Sher was not the first Jewish actor recently to essay the role on the British stage. David Suchet, for example, had played Shylock at the RSC in 1981.

3. Cf. Hermann Sinsheimer, Shylock: The History of a Character (1947; repr. New York, 1964), 133-4.

4. See Danson, 60. A Jewish merchant from Venice, Alonzo Nuñez de Herrera (Abraham Cohen de Herrera), was captured in Essex's raid on Cadiz and brought to London as one of forty hostages in 1596, where he remained until 1600. It is unlikely, however, that he bears any resemblance to Shakespeare's Shylock or (though born in Florence) to Marlowe's Barabas. See Richard H. Popkin, ‘A Jewish Merchant of Venice’, SQ [Shakespeare Quarterly] 40 (1989), 329-31.

5. See Leo Kirschbaum, ‘Shylock and the City of God’, Character and Characterization in Shakespeare (Detroit, 1962), 7-8.

6. Cecil Roth, ‘A Day in the Life of a Medieval English Jew’, Essays and Portraits in Anglo-Jewish History (Philadelphia, 1962), 36.

7. See H. G. Richardson, ‘The Expulsion’, The English Jewry under Angevin Kings (1960), 213-33.

8. A. M. Hyamson, A History of the Jews in England (1908), 125-33.

9. See Cecil Roth, A History of the Jews in England, 3rd edn. (Oxford, 1964), 132-48; E. N. Calisch, The Jew in English Literature (1909; repr. Port Washington, NY, 1969), 41-2; Hyamson, History of the Jews in England, 135-6.

10. Lucien Wolf, ‘Jews in Tudor England’, in C. Roth (ed.), Essays in Jewish History (1934), 73-90; ‘Jews in Elizabethan England’, Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society, 11 (1924-27), 1-33; C. J. Sisson, ‘A Colony of Jews in Shakespeare's London’, Essays and Studies, 23 (1937), 38-51. Far from being oppressed, the Marranos in Shakespeare's London, Sisson says, reaped the rewards of compromise and submission to law, carrying on trade or entering professions, so long as they did not flaunt their real nonconformity.

11. See Calisch, The Jew in English Literature, 51-4, and Warren D. Smith, ‘Shakespeare's Shylock’, SQ 15 (1964), 193-4.

12. Harold Fisch, The Dual Image: The Figure of the Jew in English and American Literature (New York, 1971), 13. Cf. Calisch, The Jew in English Literature, 54-6.

13. Cf. Merchant 2.2.25, where Lancelot Gobbo says, ‘Certainly the Jew is the very devil incarnation’.

14. Fisch, Dual Image, 16-18.

15. Ibid. 14. Compare Danson, who cites Fisch, Dual Image, 165-9.

16. The Play of the Sacrament, in Chief Pre-Shakespearean Dramas, ed. Joseph Quincy Adams (Cambridge, Mass., 1924), 257, ll. 651-3.

17. ‘The Jew in Western Drama: An Essay and A Checklist’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 72 (1968), 442-91; repr. in Edward Coleman, The Jew in English Drama: An Annotated Bibliography (New York, 1970), 1-50. The reference is to the reprint, p. 7.

18. See Hyamson, History of the Jews in England, 136-40, for an account of this episode, and compare Sinsheimer, Shylock, 62-8, who notes the crowd's derision as Lopez was executed.

19. See David Bevington, From ‘Mankind’ to Marlowe (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), 218-33.

20. References are to The Complete Plays of Christopher Marlowe, ed. I. Ribner (New York, 1963). For the Deity's promises to Abram, see Gen. 12: 1-3, 7; 15: 5; 17: 4-8, 16.

21. See e.g. John R. Cooper, ‘Shylock's Humanity’, SQ 21 (1970), 122.

22. M. J. Landa, The Jew in Drama (1926; repr. Port Washington, NY, 1968), 70-1. N. Nathan, ‘Three Notes on The Merchant of Venice’, Shakespeare Association Bulletin, 23 (1948), 158, 161-2 n. 9, adds seven references to ‘Jewry’, but says none are abusive. But allusions to the treachery of Judas, as in As You Like It 3.4.7-11, and Richard II 4.1.170, must also be included in any complete list.

23. See e.g. D. M. Cohen, ‘The Jew and Shylock’, SQ 31 (1980), 53-63, esp. 54-5; also Nathan, ‘Three Notes’, 157-60, and Hyam Maccoby, ‘The Figure of Shylock’, Midstream, 16 (Feb. 1970), 56-69.

24. See also Christopher Spencer, The Genesis of Shakespeare's ‘The Merchant of Venice’ (Lewiston, NY, 1988), 88-92.

25. On the famous speech that begins ‘Hath not a Jew eyes?’ (3.1.55) see ‘The Play’. …

26. Since medieval mystery and miracle plays portrayed Judas with red beard and hair and a large nose, later stage-Jews followed suit: see Landa, The Jew in Drama, 11; Calisch, The Jew in English Literature, 73; and Edgar Rosenberg, From Shylock to Svengali: Jewish Stereotypes in English Fiction (Stanford, Calif., 1960), 22. A ballad published in 1664 by an old actor, Thomas Jordan, indicates that Shakespeare's Shylock continued this tradition: see E. E. Stoll, ‘Shylock’, in Shakespeare Studies (New York, 1927), 255, 271, and Toby Lelyveld, Shylock on the Stage (Cleveland, 1960), 11. The large nose was also characteristic of Pantaloon's make-up in the commedia dell'arte, a secondary source for Shylock: see ‘Sources’ … and John R. Moore, ‘Pantaloon as Shylock’, Boston Public Library Quarterly, 1 (1949), 33-42 (cited by Spencer, Genesis, 97). Had he intended to give Shylock an identifiable accent, Shakespeare could have done so, as he does, for example, Doctor Caius in The Merry Wives of Windsor. Nevertheless, many actors persist in using a comic—usually middle-European—accent when portraying Shylock, even though Spanish—the language of Sephardic Jews—was the lingua franca of European Jews in Shakespeare's time.

27. See Marion D. Perret, ‘Shakespeare's Jew: Preconception and Performance’, SStud [Shakespeare Studies] 20 (1988), 261-8.

28. See Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, trans. Boleslaw Taborski (Garden City, NY, 1964), 212-19, and Jay L. Halio, ‘Nightingales That Roar: The Language of A Midsummer Night's Dream’, in D. G. Allen and R. A. White (eds.), Traditions and Innovations (Newark, Del. 1990), 137-49.

29. Cf. Bernard Grebanier, The Truth about Shylock (New York, 1962), 291; Cooper, ‘Shylock's Humanity’, 121; and Alan C. Dessen, ‘The Elizabethan Stage Jew and Christian Example’, Modern Language Quarterly, 35 (1974), 242-3.

30. Stage-usurers were not necessarily Jews, but stage-Jews were invariably associated with usury. See Rosenberg, From Shylock to Svengali, 27. Kirschbaum, ‘Shylock and the City of God’, 25, and Warren D. Smith, ‘Shakespeare's Shylock’, SQ 15 (1964), 193-9, try (I think unsuccessfully) to distinguish between ethnic and ethic in Antonio's attitude toward Shylock.

31. In Comic Transformations in Shakespeare (London, 1980), 130-1, Ruth Nevo develops this point.

32. See Jay L. Halio, ‘Hamlet's Alternatives’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 8 (1966), 169-88.

33. Norman Rabkin, ‘Meaning and The Merchant of Venice’, in Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning (Chicago, 1981), 7; cf. also pp. 22-3. Danson makes a similar point without citing the Falstaff passage, pp. 135-6.

34. Cf. Shylock's complaint to Tubal, ‘The curse never fell upon our nation till now; I never felt it till now’ (3.1.80-2).

Abbreviations and References

The following abbreviations are used in the introduction, collations, and commentary. The place of publication is, unless otherwise specified, London.

Editions of Shakespeare

Q: The most excellent Historie of the Merchant of Venice. Written by William Shakespeare. 1600

Q2: The Excellent History of the Merchant of Venice. Written by W. Shakespeare. 1600 [for 1619]

F: The First Folio, 1623

F2: The Second Folio, 1632

F3: The Third Folio, 1663

F4: The Fourth Folio, 1685

Bevington: David Bevington, The Merchant of Venice, Bantam Shakespeare (New York, 1988)

Brown: John Russell Brown, The Merchant of Venice, The Arden Shakespeare (1955)

Cambridge: W. G. Clark and W. A. Wright, Works, The Cambridge Shakespeare, 9 vols. (Cambridge, 1863-6), vol. ii

Capell: Edward Capell, Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, 10 vols. (1767-8), vol. iii

Collier: John Payne Collier, Works, 8 vols. (1842-4), vol. ii

Delius: N. Delius, Complete Works of William Shakespeare, 3rd edn. (1872)

Dyce: Alexander Dyce, Works, 6 vols. (1857), vol. ii

Eccles: The Comedy of The Merchant of Venice (1805)

Furness: Horace Howard Furness, The Merchant of Venice, A New Variorum Edition (Philadelphia, 1888)

Halliwell: James O. Halliwell, Works, 16 vols. (1856), vol. v

Hanmer: Thomas Hanmer, Works, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1743-4), vol. ii

Johnson: Samuel Johnson, Plays, 8 vols. (1765), vol. i

Keightley: Thomas Keightley, Plays, 6 vols. (1864)

Kittredge: George Lyman Kittredge, Works, revised by Irving Ribner (Boston, 1972)

Malone: Edmond Malone, Plays and Poems, 10 vols. (1790), vol. v

Merchant: W. Moelwyn Merchant, The Merchant of Venice, The New Penguin Shakespeare (Harmondsworth, 1967)

NCS: M. M. Mahood, The Merchant of Venice, New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge, 1987)

Neilson and Hill: A. Neilson and C. J. Hill, Complete Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare (Boston, Mass., 1942)

NS: Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and John Dover Wilson, The Merchant of Venice, The New Shakespeare (Cambridge, 1953)

Oxford: Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, Works (Oxford, 1986)

Pooler: The Merchant of Venice, ed. C. K. Pooler (1905)

Pope: Alexander Pope, Works, 6 vols. (1723-5)

Riverside: G. B. Evans (textual editor), The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston, 1974)

Rowe: Nicholas Rowe, Works, 6 vols. (1709), vol. ii

Rowe 1714: Nicholas Rowe, Works, 8 vols. (1714), vol. ii

Staunton: Howard Staunton, Plays, 3 vols. (1858-60), vol. i

Steevens: Samuel Johnson and George Steevens, Plays, 10 vols. (1773), vol. iii

Theobald: Lewis Theobald, Works, 7 vols. (1733), vol. ii

Thirlby: (unpublished conjectures in marginal notes of his copies of Shakespeare)

Warburton: William Warburton, Works, 8 vols. (1747)

Var. 1785: Samuel Johnson and George Steevens, revised by Isaac Reed, Plays, 3rd edn., 10 vols. (1785)

Var. 1793: Samuel Johnson and George Steevens, Plays, 15 vols. (1793)

Var. 1803: Samuel Johnson and George Steevens, revised by Isaac Reed, Plays, 5th edn. (1803)

Other Works

Abbott: E. A. Abbott, A Shakespearian Grammar, 2nd edn. (1870)

Barber: C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (Princeton, NJ, 1959)

Barton: John Barton, Playing Shakespeare (1984)

Brown, ‘Realization’: John Russell Brown, ‘The Realization of Shylock’, in Brown and Bernard Harris (eds.), Early Shakespeare (1961), 186-209

Bullough: Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols. (1957-75)

Bulman: James C. Bulman, Shakespeare in Performance: ‘The Merchant of Venice’ (Manchester, 1991)

Cercignani: Fausto Cercignani, Shakespeare's Works and Elizabethan Pronunciation (Oxford, 1981)

Colman: E. A. M. Colman, The Dramatic Use of Bawdy in Shakespeare (1974)

Danson: Lawrence Danson, The Harmonies of ‘The Merchant of Venice’ (1978)

Dent: R. W. Dent, Shakespeare's Proverbial Language: An Index (1981)

Granville-Barker: Harley Granville-Barker, Prefaces to Shakespeare, Second Series (1939)

Greg, SFF: W. W. Greg, The Shakespeare First Folio (Oxford, 1955)

Fischer: Sandra K. Fischer, Econolingua (Newark, Del., 1985)

Holland: Norman Holland, Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare (New York, 1966)

Jonson: Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford, 1925-52)

Kökeritz: Helge Kökertiz, Shakespeare's Pronunciation (New Haven, Conn., 1953)

Leggatt: Alexander Leggatt, Shakespeare's Comedy of Love (1974)

Lewalski: Barbara K. Lewalski, ‘Biblical Allusion and Allegory in The Merchant of Venice’, SQ 13 (1962), 327-43

Marlowe: Christopher Marlowe, Complete Plays, ed. Irving Ribner (New York, 1963)

McPherson: David C. McPherson, Shakespeare, Jonson, and the Myth of Venice (Newark, Del., 1990)

Noble: Richmond Noble, Shakespeare's Biblical Knowledge (1935)

Onions: C. T. Onions, Shakespeare Glossary, enlarged and revised by Robert D. Eagleson (1986)

Overton: Bill Overton, Text & Performance: ‘The Merchant of Venice’ (Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1987)

Oz: Avraham Oz, ‘The Egall Yoke of Love: Prophetic Unions in The Merchant of Venice’, Assaph, Section C, No. 3 (1986), 75-108

Rubinstein: Frankie Rubinstein, A Dictionary of Shakespeare's Sexual Puns and their Significance (1984)

SAB: Shakespeare Association Bulletin

SB: Studies in Bibliography

Schmidt: Alexander Schmidt, A Shakespeare Lexicon, 4th edn. (revised by G. Sarrazin), 2 vols. (Berlin and Leipzig, 1923)

Shaheen: Naheeb Shaheen, Biblical References in Shakespeare's Comedies (Newark, Del., 1992)

Sisson: C. J. Sisson, New Readings in Shakespeare, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1956)

SQ: Shakespeare Quarterly

SStud: Shakespeare Studies

SSur: Shakespeare Survey

TC: Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, with John Jowett and William Montgomery, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford, 1987)

Tilley: Morris Palmer Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1950)

Walker: W. S. Walker, A Critical Examination of Shakespeare's Text (1860)

Wright: George T. Wright, Shakespeare's Metrical Art (Berkeley, Calif., 1988)