Shylock

Lee Lady

William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice
John Wilders (editor), Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice: A Casebook
Thomas Wheeler (editor), The Merchant of Venice: Critical Essays
John W. Mahon & Ellen Macleod Mahon (editors), The Merchant of Venice: New Critical Essays
Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary
Martin Holmes, Shakespeare's Public
Albert Bermel, Shakespeare at the Moment: Playing the Comedies
Frank Kermode, Shakespeare's Language
John Barton and the Royal Shakespeare Company, Playing Shakespeare
Philip Brockbank (editor), Players of Shakespeare, 1
Alexander Leggatt, Shakespeare's Comedy of Love
 

My interest is in trying to understand what Shakespeare meant The Merchant of Venice to be and what is was like for the audiences who first saw it. This will involve knowing to some extent what sort of people these audiences were and what attitudes and beliefs they brought to the performance. I don't mean to suggest that other ways of looking at the play are "wrong." In fact, one of the things that is so great about Shakespeare is that there are so many different ways of interpreting his plays that all work.

To start with a rather incidental point (since it doesn't relate to Shylock), the play opens with Antonio saying

Antonio. In sooth, I know not why I am so sad.

This has been a very influential line for many critics, because it is one of the few pieces of information Shakespeare gives us about Antonio's character. The rest of the play doesn't actually show Antonio as being particularly sad, but it is common for critics to point to Antonio's unexplained melancholy as a significant element in understanding the play.

However Martin Holmes, in his very enlightening comments on the Merchant in his book Shakespeare and His players, has pointed out that this is a misunderstanding of Antonio's statement.

Perhaps one reason for the current misconception of the characters Salanio and Salerio in the opening scene of the play is the change in the meaning of the word sad. To us, the word implies grief, but to the Elizabethans it actually meant sober, serious, and rather dull, a sense it retains today only when used in reference to color. One has only to look through Twelfth Night to see what Shakespeare meant by it in casual conversation. There is nothing about grief in Olivia's mind when she applies it to Malvolio, and when she reminds him that she has sent for him "upon a sad occasion," it means that she wants to talk household business, not for him to go about smiling and kissing her hand and saying, "Sweet lady, ho ho!"

A lot of issues that are argued about regarding the Merchant can be considerably clarified if we know something about the audience it was written for. Without understanding this, one is open to making the sort of mistake John O'Connor makes when he writes,

As an experiment in replicating the actor-audience dynamics of the Elizabethan playhouse, Richard Olivier's production at the New Globe Theatre on Bankside in 1998 proved only that we should think very carefully indeed before concluding that Shakespeare's actors and audiences engaged in the sort of crude pantomine behavior that the New Globe seemed to be encouraging. To me it rendered extremely implausible the notion that an age which demanded the kind of attentive looking and listening required for the appreciation of works of the subtlety of Hilliard's miniatures and Byrd's masses might have performed one of their foremost dramatic poet's most ambiguous creations in a red wig and a funny nose. (From "Shylock in Performance," in The Merchant of Venice: New Critical Essays, edited by Mahon & Mahon).

One might also note that O'Connor writes from a completely anachronistic point of view in referring to Shakespeare as " the foremost dramatic poet" of the Elizabethan age and to the Merchant as his most ambiguous play. The fact is that the Elizabethans thought of plays as entertainment rather than a form of serious literature. And this was especially true of Shakespeare's plays, which were seen as quite crude in comparison to the more elevated works of playwrights such as Thomas Kyd. And there is no evidence at all that they found the Merchant an ambiguous play, or indeed that ambiguity would have been seen as a desirable quality in a play at that time.

In his book Shakespeare's Public, Martin Holmes provides some essential background information. (I have paraphrased slightly.)

The inhabitants of London were tradesmen, not persons of fashion. The court was not yet regularly established at Westminster and it had not yet become a matter of course for a courtier to have a house in London. It was enough to take lodgings there when called to Westminster for legal, Court, legal, or Parliamentary duties. Otherwise, the only reason for living in London was that one worked or traded there. The London playgoer for whom Shakespeare wrote, although not necessarily uneducated, was not a gentleman of leisure seeking a fashionable sensation, but a businessman or law student seeking entertainment after a day's work in the shop, counting-house, or one of the Inns of Court.

The players who went to the theatres where the Merchant was performed were of the same type and status as Antonio and his circle, and the house-party at Belmont represented their pleasant fantasies about a fashionable world that had at that time nothing to do with London. The play was written for an audience of Antonios and Salanios, not for the Portias, Bassanios, and Gratianos who it is now performed for.

The introduction and development in later years of a leisured London population has meant that we regard The Merchant of Venice from a standpoint diametrically opposite to that of the commercially minded Elizabethan Londoner. Nowadays the companions of Antonio are conventionally played as young men of fashion who have little in common with Antonio and little knowledge of what he is talking about. See them though as Antonio's contemporaries and business associates, and his position is established for more clearly and quickly. Coming from the lips of two fellow merchants, the speeches beginning "Your mind is tossing on the ocean" and "Believe me, sir, had I such a venture forth" are not only delightful poetry, as they are to a modern audience, but an integral part of the drama, since they show what Antonio's ventures look like to the ordinary mercantile world of which he is a part. The opinions of these two other merchants are a clear warning that he is running a clear risk by hazarding so much of his fortunes in these experiments overseas.

Critics in our own century have been inclined either to censure Bassanio or to find excuses for him. He has been called a cad and a fortune hunter for expressing sentiments which we would find perfectly acceptable if he had come from a novel by P.G. Wodehouse. Shakespeare's audience found good entertainment in this young man with a big heart, big ideas, and a still bigger overdraft, "touching" a friend for a loan so that he could outfit himself for a house-party where there would be a girl combining all lovable qualities with a satisfactory fortune. He represented a mode of life that the audience liked to dream about but did not pretend to share, let alone set up as a serious code of conduct.

When the play moves to Portia's house in Belmont, we find Portia and Nerissa speaking a mannered literary prose that one never actually finds except in books and plays. However after a few sentences of this sort to establish her character's social position, Shakespeare has mercy on his audience and lets Portia become a genuine human being, with a series of caustic remarks about her various wooers.

I will add myself that Portia's comments about the suitors are also highly stylized. It's just a different style, the sort of dialogue we find today in sitcoms where everyone's conversation is much more clever than one ever finds among one's friends. But then of course all of Shakespeare is stylized. Certainly the Elizabethans didn't go around speaking blank verse to each in their daily lives.

The play is set in Venice, and we think today of Venice as a romantic city perfectly appropriate for a fairy-tale story. But the Elizabethans didn't think of it that way. Quoting again from Shakespeare's Public by Martin Holmes:

The London merchant knew more about Venice than the Venetian usually knew about London. Whereas the Londoner often went abroad in the interests of commerce, the Venetian, in his central position, was content to let commerce come to him from the various quarters of the Adriatic and the Mediterranean. Quite a number of Londoners would have seen, and even more would have heard of, the way in which the Venetian gentleman, whether courtier, scholar, or merchant prince, went about within the precincts of Venice in a decorous gown close-buttoned to the neck and wrists, revealing the bravery of his doublet and hose only when on the mainland or when visiting his mistress indoors at night.

When I started thinking about the Merchant, I hoped to be able to say that the issue of anti-Semitism is a red herring for this play, and that Shakespeare had no interest in Jews, knew nothing about Jews, and picked a Jew as a convenient almost mythical villain in the same way that the James Bond films used citizens of various communist nations or that a modern film might use a drug dealer or motorcycle gang. A number of critics have certainly suggested things to this effect.

Here is a paraphrased quote from Shakespeare's Public by Martin Holmes.

To us, the Jew may be estimable, humorous, enviable, pitiable, contemptible, or detestable, depending on our personal, racial, or political inclinations, but whatever else he is, he will not be unfamiliar. We are used to plays about Jews, jokes about Jews, fashionable photographs of successful Jews, and we encounter Jews in all walks of our ordinary life. But the Londoner who first saw Shylock had very few examples for comparison. Jews had been banished from England in 1290, three centuries before Shakespeare, and the legal banishment would not be lifted until the time of Cromwell. Broadly speaking, therefore, the Elizabethan playgoer had only two Jews in his mind's eye --- one in fiction, the other in fact. He had probably applauded Alleyn playing the role of the vicious plotter and poisoner in Marlowe's play The Jew of Malta, and he might have stood in the crowd and seen the execution of old Roderigo Lopez, a Portuguese Jew who had been convicted of accepting a bribe to try and poison Queen Elizabeth (although probably innocent). There was no serious anti-Semitism to the Lopez case. On the contrary, it was because Jews were unfamiliar and exotic that it was possible to believe anything about them without any particular ill-feeling.

This is fine as far at is goes, but there's more to be said. From John Palmer's book Comic Characters of Shakespeare, one learns that the Lopez case was a scandal of very widespread interest. Roderigo Lopez had been a member of the College of Physicians, and was the medical attendant for many notable persons in addition to the Queen herself, including the Earl of Leicester, who was patron to Shakespeare's company. It is certainly coneivable that Shakespeare may have been acquainted with him.

"Anti-semitism," John Palmer says, "was in fashion in London at the time Shakespeare wrote the Merchant."  Marlowe's play was extremely popular.

On the other hand, the public sentiment was not all one-sided. Palmer writes:

There is, of course, another side to the picture. The execution of Lopez, while it gratified the Jew baiters, seemed to have provoked indignation and even a searching of hearts among the more reasonable and sensible citizens of London. Elizabeth, who believed that Lopez was innocent, at first refused to sign the death warrant. She yielded to popular sentiment, stimulated by the Earl of Essex (who had manufactured the evidence against Lopez and also conveniently presided as judge at his trial) and his friends, but against her better judgement. Even in Shakespeare's time, opinions were divided on the Jewish question.

We know that Shakespeare was in the entertainment business, not the business of politics or evangelism. It was crucial for Shakespeare's continuing success that he please his audience. Certainly he would have seen that a play about Jews at this time would definitely attract an audience. And a play based on the assumption that Jews are evil would be likely to be successful for most of his audience.

But one should not assume that pleasing his audience was Shakespeare's only concern. I believe that it is clear from the texts that Shakespeare was the sort of writer who could only write if he pleased himself. Furthermore, he undoubtedly also knew that there were people in London who would disagree with a one-sided attack on Jews. Whether people with such attitudes were among his audience at the time the Merchant was originally performed is another question. But certainly within a few years (after he started producing plays at Blackfriars in Southwark), his theatre would be attracting an audience that would included the nobility and would have included such liberals.

Furthermore, one never knows why a particular line in a play by Shakespeare has been added or subtracted, or when. It is known that sometimes lines or whole scenes were added in order to avoid offending a certain Important Person. We know that important scenes are missing from the text we have for Macbeth for this reason. And one never knows to what extent the text (or texts) that we have are the same as the text that was performed. (I suspect that at some point, some Important Person suggested to Shakespeare that it would be wise for him to have Shylock convert to Christianity. And so he obliged, never suspecting that centuries later, critics would be condemning him for the few apparently innocuous lines he added.)

It seems to me that to understand the play as the Elizabethans would have, we should think of Shylock in terms of some ethnic type which is known to us, and often thought of as vaguely sinister, but with which very few Americans would be familiar. Think of an Iraqi or an Iranian or Somali, for instance, or a Cuban immigrant to the US or a Columbian, or a Romanian or a Vietnamese. We Americans don't necessarily think of such people as automatically evil, but when we read about a group of them being involved in some criminal activity, most of us find it easy to believe. These ethnic groups make convenient villains in movies. To show one as a sympathetic character in a film or play is certainly possible, but it takes a lot of effort to make the audience see the humanity of a character in such an ethnic group.

Usury

In my opinion, the issue of usury is crucial to the way Shakespeare's Elizabethan audience understood the Merchant. Although Shakespeare's audience probably had mixed feelings about Jews, I believe that they would have had very definite and strong feelings about moneylenders.

Most people know that the New Testament condemns the lending of money at interest and that during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Jews took on the profession of moneylenders precisely because they were not subject to this biblical prohibition. However by Shakespeare's time, usury was legal in England and, at least in principle, regulated, with the maximum legal interest rate being set at 10 per cent. (In practice, much higher rates were sometimes charged.) And certainly today, when almost every day brings solicitations in the mail from banks trying to get us to apply for their credit cards, we take it for granted that if a bank or finance company is going to lend money, they will ask for interest in return.

But charging interest, I believe, was not the primary reason that Shakespeare's audience thought of usury as an evil. Shakespeare's audience, as pointed out in the passage quoted from Martin Holmes above, were in large part businessmen and tradespeople. To this audience, usury was not merely a sin, it was an evil that destroyed businesses and ruined men's lives.

In Act 3, Scene 3, Antonio says about Shylock,

Antonio. He seeks my life. His reason well I know;
I oft delivered from his forfeitures
Many that have at times made moan to me.
Therefore he hates me.

Naively, one would think that a moneylender would be pleased when someone helped one of his clients pay back the money that was owed. But Shylock made his profits primarily not from the interest he charged but by foreclosing on the property of the businessmen who were unable to make good on their loans with him. (A miller, for instance, in order to borrow money would probably have to mortgage his most valuable asset: his millstone.) When Antonio helped bail out one of Shylock's clients who was in trouble, he was, in Shylock's eyes, all but engaging in an unfair business practice.

Even in British novels of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, one still finds the same attitude that moneylenders are evil. Turning to moneylenders, in fact, is seen as the last desperate step that leads to ruin. And the attitude that bankers are evil parasites and bloodsuckers can be seen in nineteenth century American melodrama, and in fact is not that uncommon even today.

Shakespeare's audience did not consist of highbrows who could be attracted to something called a "Black Comedy" or "The Theatre of the Absurd." They were, at least for the most part, level-headed working people. They knew that what was presented in the theatre was fantasy and they had no problem with a play like A Midsummer Night's Dream. But a play would not attract them unless, on some level, it made sense. The audience knew that Shylock's demanding a pound of flesh for security was not realistic, but I think that, for many at least, a pound of flesh was not by any means an absurd metaphor for the demands for payment made on desperate borrowers by usurers. I think that many of them would have been not in the least bothered by Portia's lack of mercy toward Shylock in the courtroom scene because they had seen a similar lack of mercy from usurers all too often. (Mercy is not a quality one normally associates with bankers and finance companies.)

To understand why the audience could laugh along with the Christians in the play when Shylock's daughter runs away from him, stealing a large amount of money in the process, or how the audience could continue to be sympathetic to Portia when, in the courtroom scene, she swindles him (as surely she does, posing as an impartial expert when she is nothing of the sort) out of all his wealth ("his life savings," as Harold Bloom would have it), we should think of Shylock as being analogous to a drug dealer in a contemporary film, or to Don Corleone in The Godfather trilogy. Stealing from such a person is seen as a heroic act.

The Merchant of Venice As a Sitcom

My interest in Shakespeare came about somewhat recently because while watching films of some of his plays, especially the Peter Hall 1969 production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, the idea came to me that Shakespeare's plays were originally much more like modern sitcoms than like contemporary "serious" drama.

In his essay "Shakespeare's Method: The Merchant of Venice" (from the book The Merchant of Venice: Critical Essays, edited by Thomas Wheeler), John Middleton Murray writes:

If the English theatre be considered as a place of popular entertainment, on a level with the football field, the prize-ring, and the racecourse, then The Merchant of Venice is the type of entertainment the theatre should supply --- villain discomfited, virtue rescued, happy marriages, clowning, thrills, and a modest satisfaction of the general appetite for naughtiness.

What attracted my attention in the Merchant of Venice is the business of the rings, which begins at the conclusion of the "courtroom" scene in the Duke's chambers. There is an inherent comedy in the ring business which is very much ignored or downplayed by the actors in the performances I have watched. And these performance also downplay the comedy involved in Portia trying to carry off a disguise as a male jurist, a comedy Portia foreshadows in her remarks to Nerissa beforehand.

Nerissa. Shall they see us?

Portia. Yes, but in such a habit
That they shall think we are accomplished
With that we lack. I'll hold thee any wager,
When we are both accoutred like young men,
I'll prove the prettier fellow of the two,
And wear the dagger with the braver grace,
And speak between the change of man and boy
With a reed voice, and turn two mincing steps
Into a manly stride, and speak of frays
Like a fine bragging youth; and tell quaint lies,
How honorable ladies sought my love,
Which, I denying, they fell sick and died ---
I could not do withall. Then I'll repent
And wish, for all that, that I had not killed them.
And twenty of these puny lies I'll tell,
That men shall swear I have discontinued school
Above a twelvemonth. I have within my mind
A thousand raw tricks of these bragging Jacks,
Which I will practice.

An audience with any familiarity at all with comedies can readily predict that after this boastful prediction, the performance of Portia and Nerissa in drag is going to be hilarious.

Thinking about this made me realize in fact that the whole courtroom scene could be seen as something out of I Love Lucy, with Lucille Ball in the role of Portia clowning around in her male disguise and yet at the same time making some very serious points. In the Duke's chambers, Portia has to be funny but she also has to be able to deliver the Quality of Mercy speech in a way that is sincere and convincing. And in a way, that's what makes the courtroom scene the funniest: the fact that this dame turns out not to be just a rich bimbo. I have discussed this in much more detail in my article on Portia, where I have also pointed out the comic elements of Shylock's appearance in court.

Now certainly the Merchant of Venice is not a sitcom. But looking at it as one can help bring out certain structural aspects of the play.

From a purely structural point of view, the play is the story of Bassanio and Portia. Looked at as a sitcom, Bassanio and Portia and Antonio play the role of the happy family group, and Shylock is the outside force that threatens to disrupt the family and has to be eventually expelled to restore harmony.

Looked at this way, Shylock would then function somewhat like a guest star in a sitcom episode, And he is the sort of guest star who has an ability and power that's so much beyond the range of the other actors that even though he may appear in only a few scenes, he completely overshadows the regular cast, who wind up almost in the role of supporting actors for him.

And in fact, Shylock, who appears in only five scenes and has only 360 lines in the play, has very few interactions at all with the Christian characters in the play, who for the most part can scarcely manage to answer his speeches. For practical purposes, most of Shylock's speeches, except those in the courtroom and the ones to his fellow Jew Tubal, his daughter Jessica, and his servant Launcelot Gobbo, might almost be soliloquies. True, in his first scene, in Act 1, he has his one significant conversation with Antonio, which is one of the things people always remember about the play. But even in this scene, Antonio functions almost as a straight man for Shylock. And then in Act 3 Scene 3, Shylock again appears with Antonio, who is now walking the streets in the custody of a jailer, but in this scene Antonio's only lines directed to Shylock in this scene are, "Hear me yet, good Shylock," and "I pray thee hear me speak." Only in the courtroom scene, does Shylock have a little bit of a real interaction, but only with Portia (in disguise).

But just as was the case of Falstaff in Henry IV, Shakespeare became so fascinated by this minor character that he let him completely overshadow the larger portion of the play. And although Shakespeare turned aside from the Shylock-Antonio axis and wrote the sitcom he had been planning, Shylock's personality is what drives the play. Shylock is the dynamic heart of the play, the force that makes us want to read it and want to perform it. He can be played so that he repulses us or played as sympathetic, but he always gets our attention. He is the only character in the play who is really interesting as a person (aside from maybe Launcelot Gobbo, the clown). He is the only character in the play who has strong emotions.

No other character has enough force to make the play interesting to us. Certainly not Antonio, the title character. Or Bassanio, who encounters a number of challenging situations but never himself actually does very much. And not Portia, who is the one person in the play aside from Shylock who does have an interesting story. However Portia's story is not the one Shakespeare has chosen to tell; he has merely given us little glimpses of it.

What happens if you take Shylock out of the courtroom scene and have the Duke present the legal case against Antonio? The legal duel is still perfectly satisfactory, but the scene falls completely flat. The Merchant is not a dramatized debate on legal issues, it is a contest between personalities. And Shylock and Portia are the only powerful personalities in the play.

As Harold Bloom writes in his book on Shakespeare,

There is an extraordinary energy in Shylock's prose and poetry, a force both cognitive and passional which palpably is in excess of the play's comic requirements. More even than Marlowe's Jew of Malta, Shylock is a villain both farcical and scary, though time has worn away both qualities.

I often find Harold Bloom extremely wrong-headed and a drastically disagree with some of his comments on the Merchant. However I find his comments here are exactly on the mark, and in fact almost my whole article here could be almost regarded as merely an expansion of this one paragraph of Bloom's.

But I'm quite sure that we're not meant to identify with Shylock (although it's certainly possible, and most modern performances foster such an identification at least to some extent). And you can't call Shylock a protagonist.

Once Shylock is defeated, he disappears in a flash . We no longer care about him, and in Act 5 it's as if he had never even existed.