The question of the Lopez affair and its relation to the figure of Shylock drew the attention of a number of critics and historians in the latter decades of the nineteenth century.¹⁵ These accounts portray Lopez's treachery, his influence on the design of Shylock, and Shakespeare's intentions in representing the Jew. The study 1 would like to focus on, however, is the one that addressed itself most directly to the Victorian Shakespeare establishment and which was, most obviously, part of the wave of response to Irving's Merchant of Venice, appearing as it did in the Gentleman's Magazine in February 1880, about halfway through the production's opening run. Moreover, the essay, entitled "The Original of Shylock," deserves particular notice here not only for "attract[ing] . . . the attention of Shakespearean scholars" (SSL 3) but also for its part in launching one of the Victorian era's most distinguished literary careers. The eighteen-year-old undergraduate author of the essay went by the forenames Solomon Lazarus. But, for the sake of his career he changed his name, it is popularly believed, on the advice of Oxford's Benjamin Jowett, ironically, a man who had himself been accused of excessive displays of religious radicalism.¹⁶ As an eminent Shakespearean, editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, first biographer of Queen Victoria, fellow of the British Academy, founding member of the English Association, and member of the Athenaeum Club, to name only a few of his distinctions, Solomon Lazarus was better known to the world as Sidney or, more fully, as Sir Sidney Lee.

In his search for the original of Shylock, Sidney Lee posits four categories of evidence pertaining to the putative links between Shylock and his historical prototype. In outline he argues that the date of composition of The Merchant of Venice more or less coincides with the date of the alleged conspiracy and its aftermath; that the text of The Merchant contains topical references; that Shakespeare's protagonist, the merchant Antonio, was likely drawn with the protagonist of the Lopez affair in mind; and that Shylock and Lopez display similarities of character too great to be coincidental. As general categories of evidence, these seem fair enough, and, indeed, at the time of the article's publication they greatly impressed established authorities in Elizabethan studies such as J. O. Halliwell-Phillips and F. J. Furnivall. In the context of this study, however, the evidence that Sidney Lee offers with regard to Lopez and his relation to Shylock is compelling primarily in ways that the author and his contemporaries probably did not intend. Rather, what is remarkable from this vantage point is the extent to which the perception of a significant relation between the two figures is, effectively, inevitable, as are the particular narrative formulations mobilized in telling the story of Lopez and Shylock. It was a story that had been told before.

Sidney Lee's most straightforward argument is that pertaining to The Merchant's date of composition, his claim being that the play "appeared for the first time not much more than three months after Lopez's famous execution" (Lee, "Original" 198). But, while it seems unlikely that Shakespeare—or, for that matter, anyone living in London at the time—would have been unaware of so public an event as the execution of the queen's personal physician, Lee's dating of the play and his connection of the two events is largely speculative. Nonetheless, at the time this would have constituted a scholarly argument. His remaining points, by way of contrast, display increasingly prominent elements of fantasy amid the learned speculation.

Lee's identification of topical references, for example, suggests that the connections he was arguing for were, in some imaginative sense, already in place. A conventional allusion to "the rack," which occurs as part of an exchange between the lovers Portia and Bassanio, is taken, without question, to allude to the fate of those implicated in the plot against Elizabeth,¹⁷ while an anachronistic reference to trial by jury—a procedure not known in Venice during the time in which The Merchant is set—leads him directly to conclude that it must have been intended to suggest "the way in which an English court of law would treat a Jew" (Lee, "Original" 199). As far as the link between the protagonist of the play and the protagonist of the Lopez affair is concerned, somewhat fantastically, Lee's evidence here consists of little more than the fact that they were both called Antonio. Pointing out that "the name Antonio .. . was very common among the Portuguese"—the protagonist of the Lopez affair was Don Antonio, pretender to the Portuguese throne—it is not "by any means," Lee argues, "so ordinary an Italian one as Lorenzo or Ludovico" (197). It is difficult to know how to respond to this assertion, especially considering the stir it caused in the Shakespearean academic community at the time. To respond insofar as possible in the spirit of the author, however, one can only point out that, with the exception of certain "Citizens," "Servants," "Soldiers," "Ladies," "Gentlemen," and "Ghosts," Antonio is, as a matter of record, the single most commonly occurring name in all of Shakespeare's oeuvre.

Finally, there is Sidney Lee's claim that the similarities of character between Lopez and Shylock are too great to be coincidental. While Lee concedes that not much can be said definitively of Lopez's character, since his "extant correspondence is very incomplete, and gives us only glances here and there of his characteristics," he is nevertheless willing to comment, with authority, on points of character. Firstly, although he doesn't say why, Lee asserts "with some probability" that "the spirit of revenge in the doctor's case was similar in calibre to that in Shylock's." Even more to the point, however, he commits himself with "certainty" to the following claim:

In their devotion to their family the two Jews closely resemble each other. Neither Lopez nor Shylock, in good fortune or in bad, fail to exemplify the Jewish virtue of domesticity. Lopez excused his attendance at court on the ground that the illness of his wife detained him at home. His Dutch correspondents never omit to send his family affectionate remembrances from his Jewish friends in Holland, whatever be the subject of the letter, and he never omits to return them. Similarly, Shylock's love for his daughter and for his wife Leah, whose memory he piously cherishes, are touches of character which theories of dramatic art only incompletely explain. (Lee, "Original" 198-99)

There are two chronically recurring narratives at work here, the first of which is the story of "the Jewish virtue of domesticity," a virtue that, as we have already seen, necessarily connotes hidden vice. The fact that Lopez's correspondence includes conventional greetings and inquiries after the welfare of friends abroad or that, as a husband and doctor, he should have attended his wife in illness is to Sidney Lee, as they would undoubtedly have been to the Inquisition, signs of the innately suspect nature of Jews. Here, as everywhere else, Jewish participation in the commonplace is a sign of secret goings-on. Thus, the fact that Shylock loves his daughter and reveres the memory of his dead wife cannot possibly be taken at face value. They are enigmatic signifiers, "touches of character which theories of dramatic art only incompletely explain."

The second narrative at work here is one that Sidney Lee authored but did not, in any ordinary sense, write. For, like a man holding up a mirror while looking in the mirror, Sidney Lee, in rooting out the story of Lopez embedded in the figure of Shylock, manifested yet again the infinitely regressive life of the secret Jew. The story of Lee's own life is the story of a great public figure, a man who made his way, by virtue of his talent and industry, to the top of the Victorian intellectual establishment; it is the story of a man deemed fit to write the life of the queen. Considering the accomplishments he could list by the time he died, one would hardly remember that what had launched his career was nothing more than an essay exposing the relation of an infamous Jewish villain to a secret Jew, a great public figure who, like Lee himself, had made his way, by virtue of his talent and industry, to the top of the Elizabethan establishment and who, until he was found out, had been deemed fit to guard the life of the queen. Even less would it be remembered that until he had written that essay, as a young man, Sir Sidney had gone by another name.

Notes

¹ On spectacular production, see Michael Booth, Victorian Spectacular Theatre, 1850-1910 (London: RKP, 1981); Richard Foulkes, ed., Shakespeare and the Victorian Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986), esp. "Part 1: Shakespeare in the Picture Frame"; William E. Kleb, "Shakespeare in Tottenham-Street: An 'Aesthetic' Merchant of Venice," Theatre Survey 16.2 (1975): 97-121.

² The dominance of Irving's interpretation is further indicated by the fact that no notable production of the Merchant which did not feature Irving in the role of Shylock was mounted in London until 1905. For a complete list of notable productions and revivals, see Freda Gaye, ed., Who's Who in the Theatre (London: Pitman, 1967), 1434. For a more general overview of Jews on the late Victorian stage, see Shearer West, "The Construction of Racial Type: Caricature, Ethnography, and Jewish Physiognomy in Fin-de-Siècle Melodrama," Nineteenth Century Theatre 21.1 (1993): 4-40.

³ Irving's first public defense of his Shylock appeared in Theatre on 1 Dec. 1879 (254-55), as part of a symposium on the character. For a lengthy reassertion of his original intentions several years into the history of the production, see Joseph Hatton, Henry Irving's Impressions of America, vol. 1 (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1884), 262-75.

⁴ John Gross's claim that "it is generally agreed that his [Irving's] interpretation grew less sympathetic over the years" (141) is unsupported by any convincing evidence. Virtually the only critic to express this view was William Winter, a notorious American theater critic and by Gross's own admission an extremist, who was known as an arch-conservative and a bigot, consistently antagonistic toward non-Anglo-Saxon foreigners on the American stage (Oxford Companion to the Theatre 897). Winter's account of Irving's Shylock, in Shakespeare on the Stage, appears to be Gross's source. But what Gross fails to take into account is Winter's own reading of The Merchant by which he then measures the legitimacy or illegitimacy of subsequent interpretations of Shylock's role. The lurid language Winter uses to describe his ideal of a convincing Jew, coupled with his belief that "the true Shylocjc of Shakespeare" must be "hard, merciless, inexorable, terrible" (178), strongly suggests that Irving's softening of the role did not sit well with Winter's own feelings about Jews. The two men were friends for many years, and it is likely that Winter was reading into Irving's performance what he wished were there but, as other evidence would suggest, manifestly was not.

⁵ For a selection of reviews of Irving's American tour of 1883, see Mr. Henry Irving and Miss Ellen Terry in America: Opinions of the Press (Chicago: John Morris, 1884).

⁶ Edward Moore, in his essay "Henry Irving's Shakespearean Productions" (Theatre Survey 17.2 [1976]: 201), says, for example, that Irving "cared nothing about realizing a play as written, but only about making his effects; and splendid as these no doubt were, most of us would rather have Shakespeare's."

⁷ On the importance of conversion as a cultural motif and of the father-daughter relationship in this context, see Michael Ragussis's compelling Figures of Conversion: "The Jewish Question" and English National Identity (Durham: Duke UP, 1995).

⁸ Robert Hichens, in his essay "Irving as Shylock" (in We Saw Him Act, ed. H. A. Saintsbury and Cecil Palmer [London: Hurst and Blackett, 1939], 168), remarks on how unforgettable this bit of stage business was.

⁹ For an example of just such a discussion, see Frederick Hawkins, "The Character of Shylock;" Theatre (1 Nov. 1879): 191-98; and the roundtable discussion involving numerous commentators, including Irving himself, the following month (Theatre [1 Dec. 1879]).

¹⁰ For a recent account of Lopez, see David Katz, "The Jewish Conspirators of Elizabethan England" The Jews in the History of England, 1485-1850 (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1994): 49-106.

¹¹ See also, Sander Gilman. Jewish Self-Hatred (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986): 37 ff., 61 ff.

¹² On changing perceptions of Marranism, see Miriam Bodian, " 'Men of the Nation': The Shaping of Converso Identity in Early Modern Europe," Past and Present 143 (1994): 48-76.

¹³ See Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred, chap. 3, esp. 83 ff.

¹⁴ On this point, see also Moshe Lazar, " 'Scorched Parchments and Tortured Memories': The 'Jewishness' of the Anussim (Crypto-Jews)," in Cultural Encounters: The Impact of the Inquisition in Spain and the New World, ed. Mary Elizabeth Perry and Anne J. Cruz (Berkeley: U of California P, 1991), 182 ff.

¹⁵ See Arthur Dimock, "The Conspiracy of Dr. Lopez," English Historical Review (July 1894): 440-72; and John W. Hales, "Shakespeare and the Jews," English Historical Review (Oct. 1894): 652-61'.

¹⁶ See C. H. Firth, Sir Sidney Lee, 1859-1926, in Proceedings of the British Academy (London: Humphrey Milford, 1929), 15:3.

¹⁷

Bassanio:
Let me choose,
For as I am, I live upon the rack.

Portia:
Upon the rack Bassanio? Then confess
What treason there is mingled with your love.

Bassanio:
None but that ugly treason of mistrust
Which makes me fear th'enjoying of my love.
There may as well be amity and life
'Tween snow and fire, as treason and my love.

Portia:
Ay, but I fear you speak upon the rack,
Where men enforced do speak anything.

Bassanio:
Promise me life and I'll confess the truth.

Portia:
Well then, confess and live.

(III.ii.25-39)