The Merchant of Venice and anti-Semitism in the Treatment of Shylock - Essay Example

"The Merchant of Venice" and anti-Semitism as shown in the treatment of Shylock Shakespearewrote The Merchant of Venice at a time when few Jews lived in England, from where they had been forcibly expelled in 1290 by Edward I. Nevertheless, the Jew remained a powerful image in English literature and drama throughout the succeeding ages. The trial and execution of Queen Elizabeth's physician, Dr. Roderigo Lopez, in 1594; the revival of Marlowe's play, The Jew of Malta; and other events aroused renewed anti-Semitism in England and may have led Shakespeare to contemplate writing about a rich Jewish moneylender who, like Barabas in Marlowe's play, acts the role of a villain. But unlike Marlowe, Shakespeare endowed his villain Shylock with some very human qualities that evoke much sympathy. (Glock, 144-50) The result is an ambivalence toward Shylock that makes his role one of the most dramatically complex and compelling among all of Shakespeare's characters, and one that reinforces the sense of this work as a problem play. (Oldrieve, 87) Next to Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice is Shakespeare's most frequently performed play. The reason for its apparent popularity may be in part because it is perennially a required text set for national examinations that students in British secondary schools take. It is less popular in the United States because of the anti-Semitism that the play incorporates, although many producers, directors, and actors have argued that while the play contains elements of anti-Semitism, it is not in itself anti-Semitic. Recently, some scholars have tried to show that, on the contrary, Shakespeare explores ways to reconcile the age-old antagonisms between Christians and Jews.( Glock, 144-50) Shylock, of course, is not the only important character in The Merchant of Venice, which takes its title from Antonio, the Venetian merchant who borrows from Shylock to help his friend, Bassanio. Portia, the rich heiress whom Bassanio courts, is another major character, and the relationship between her and her suitors also raises important moral issues. Unfortunately, in the history of anti-Semitism, Shylock has since become a symbol for a heartless, money-grubbing Jew. Heartless he may be in act 4, but earlier he offers Antonio a loan at no interest in an attempt to win his friendship (1.3.134-37). Usury is the lending of money at interest. It was considered to be inappropriate for a Christian to do this, and as a result, Jews who were in the business of usury were looked down upon. Antonio, who lends money freely, appears to be the charitable Christian, in contrast to Shylock, who preys upon the hardship of others in order to further increase his own material wealth. The perception created by Antonio's argument is that Shylock hates someone for their following a Christian virtue, which implies that Shylock is against Christianity. The demonization of Shylock proceeds by three stages: Shylock is stripped of his name. In the entire play his referred to by name only three times; in the trial scene, the Duke twice identifies him by name, and Portia does so once. In the course of the rest of the play he is called "the Jew" or "dog Jew"(II,viii,14) or "currish Jew"(IV,I,133-34). Shylock is reduced to something other than human. Gratiano curses Shylock with "O, be thou damned, inexecrable dog!"(IV,i,128) Shylock is equated with the devil. In (II,ii,24-28), Launcelot Gobbo identifies Shylock as "a kind of devil", "the devil himself", and "the very devil incarnation". The images of Jews as blood-thirsty murderers of Jesus who snatch innocent Christian children for slaughter in bizarre Passover rituals seems to provide a potent back-drop for the demonic traits heaped upon Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. Shylock is characterized nearly throughout the play as an evil, murderous man. This image of him is supported by the excessive bloodlust that Shylock exhibits. (Rosen, 89-93) The audience is made to hate Shylock early on. In Act 1, scene 3, Shylock tells the audience that he hates Antonio "for he is a Christian." (1, 3, 42) For an audience composed nearly completely of Christians, this was a line simply meant to provoke the audience to hate Shylock. Jessica relates how "when I was with him I have heard him swear / To Tubal and to Chus, his countrymen, / That he would rather have Antonio's flesh / Than twenty times the value of the sum / That he did owe him." (3, 2, 296-300) Once Jessica elopes with Lorenzo, stealing Shylock's ducats, Shylock tells Tubal that he wishes his daughter "were dead at my foot and the jewels in her ear; would she were hearsed at my foot and the ducats in her coffin!" (3, 1, 87-90) When Shylock discovers that Antonio's ship will not come in, his cruelty is revealed. He declares, "I'm very glad of it. I'll plague him, I'll torture him, I am glad of it." (3, 1, 115-116) At the end of Act 3, scene 1, Shylock's true motive is revealed. Shylock says, "I will have the heart of him if he forfeit, for were he out of Venice I can make what merchandise I will." (3, 1, 125-127) All these comments clearly attempt to paint Shylock as a money-worshipping murderer and not as a person. In every confrontation with Shylock, the other characters attack him with insults that make him appear even viler than his cruel demeanor portrays. There is a common trend throughout the play of demonizing Shylock. In Act 1, scene 2, Antonio counters a legitimate argument that Shylock makes to support his usurping by stating that "the devil can cite scripture for his purpose!" (1, 3, 107) In Act 2, scene 2, Lancelet Gobbo identifies Shylock as "a kind of devil", "the devil himself", and "the very devil incarnation." (2, 2, 24-28) Solanio identifies Shylock as "the devil . . . in the likeness of a Jew" (3, 1, 20-22) and Bassanio identifies Shylock the same way, as "cruel devil." (4, 1, 225) This repeated characterization is certainly driven hard into the minds of the audience nearly to the point where they would mindlessly chant, "Shylock equals devil," whenever he appeared on stage. However, this characterization is emphasized so much that the audience may also realize its absurdity. There are, however, three examples from The Merchant of Venice that do not fall along the line of the anti-Semitism that prevails in other parts of the play. The first example is in Act 1, scene 3 where the audience meets Shylock for the first time. Although the audience is almost immediately greeted with the Shylock's announcement that he hates Antonio because he is Christian, the audience is also confronted with unsettling information about the so-called good Christian, Antonio. Shylock reminds Antonio that oftentimes Antonio abused and insulted Shylock on the street, and Shylock merely turned his cheek. Shylock says, "suff'rance is the badge of all our tribe." (1, 3, 120) This comment does not fit into the stereotype of Shylock as evil and conniving, and the audience should be very disturbed when Shylock makes a just argument, asking why he should help Antonio at all when he had kicked him, called him a dog, and even spat on him. Act 3, scene 1 contains probably the most powerful example of Shylock breaking out of his stereotype. Shylock has just suffered the worst experience of his life so far. His only daughter, Jessica, has run off with a Christian and stole thousands of ducats when she left. No justice shall be carried out concerning this because he is a Jew. Shylock responds, almost breaking out of character by saying: "I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions, fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is If you prick us, do we not bleed If you tickle us, do we not laugh If you poison us, do we not die And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example Why, revenge. The villainy you teach me I will execute; and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction." (3, 1, 57-72) This speech is the main proof that The Merchant of Venice is not a wholly anti-Semitic play. Had Shakespeare wanted to keep Shylock a simple one-dimensional character, a crude stereotype, he never would have included this speech. (Heller, 147-67) Unfortunately, immediately following this speech, Shylock makes a speech to Tubal that can change the audience's perspective of Shylock. He tell Tubal that he wishes his daughter were dead and that he had his money back. This can be interpreted by the audience in two ways. Out of the context of the earlier speech, Shylock would appear to be acting as a stereotypical Jew, but within the context of the speech, the audience can interpret Shylock's comment as an attempt by him to express how hurt he is that Jessica left him. Act 4, scene 1 includes another example of an inconsistency in the trend of anti-Semitism in the play. It is composed of the trial determining whether or not Antonio must hold to his contract and allow Shylock to subtract a pound of flesh from his body. Everyone in the scene is absolutely opposed to Shylock, who is clearly playing his role as the stereotypical Jew, bent on killing the Christian. Portia enters and preaches mercy to Shylock, attempting to reach some sort of "Christian" goodness inside of him. She says, "the quality of mercy is not strained." (4, 1, 190) When Shylock refuses to acknowledge this, Portia catches him on a technicality in his bond. She uses every extent of the law in order to strip Shylock of his entire estate. She practices none of the mercy she preached minutes before. Antonio, the supposed "good Christian" proposes that Shylock be robbed of his religion as well, and be christened. The outright hypocrisy of the Christian characters should disgust the audience. This proves that the subject of the play is anti-Semitism, but that it is actually a criticism of anti-Semitism, rather than an example of it. The Merchant of Venice contains enough anti-Semitic material for it to be portrayed as a classic Elizabethan anti-Semitic play, among the likes of Christopher Marlow's The Jew of Malta, however, unlike The Jew of Malta, The Merchant of Venice also contains several important pieces that, if portrayed correctly, can shift the entire mood of the play. Because of these pieces, a director can make The Merchant of Venice into a scathing criticism of Anti-Semites and their beliefs. Shylock can be portrayed as a hero, rather than a villain, by emphasizing the speech that he makes to Lorenzo and Tubal and by making Portia's cruelty in Act 4, scene 1 especially evident. Because of this notion, The Merchant of Venice is not innately anti-Semitic. It can either be anti-Semitic or an aggressive criticism of anti-Semitism, or anything in between It depends on how it is interpreted by directors and by actors and how the audience receives it. The Christians and children treat creditors, Jewish or Christian, as men whose powers of not just monetary but also human generation must be attacked, whose symbolic place in the reproductive order must be altered through verbal castration. Such castration works in two ways: the unmanning can make the creditor-father more like a generous or relatively economically powerless mother; more centrally in Merchant, it denies the creditor any position as literal or symbolic parent, as privileged over any child as that child's originator. (Leslie, 123-25) The play's swing from Old Testament justice to New Testament mercy, for example, is not entirely successful: in the trial, as others have noted, Portia's appeal to mercy and her microscopically close reading of the law only work through a harsh application of justice, (Leslie, 131) and in the Christians' effort to valorize the newer religion and younger figures over the older, they cannot forget that the new and young originate in the old. Shylock, the Jewish moneylender in The Merchant of Venice who famously demands a pound of flesh as security for a loan to his anti-Semitic tormentors, is one of Shakespeare's most complex and idiosyncratic characters. With his unsettling eloquence and his varying voices of protest, play, rage, and refusal, Shylock remains a source of perennial fascination. What explains the strange and enduring force of this character, so unlike that of any other in Shakespeare's plays Kenneth Gross posits that the figure of Shylock is so powerful because he is the voice of Shakespeare himself.(Kenneth, 49-52) Marvelously speculative and articulate, Shylock is a breakthrough for Shakespeare the playwright, an early realization of the Bard's power to create dramatic voices that speak for hidden, unconscious, even inhuman impulses-characters larger than the plays that contain them. Shylock is also a mask for Shakespeare's own need, rage, vulnerability, and generosity, giving form to Shakespeare's ambition and his uncertain bond with the audience. (http://www.amazon.com/Shylock-Shakespeare-Kenneth-Gross/dp/0226309770) Given the materiality and therefore the unreliability of clothes as signifiers of rank, an effective rhetorical performer like Autolycus is impossible to place socially. The trickster, beggar, peddler, and ex-courtier capitalizes on the effective speech needed to function well in each of these professions. Even after he has been banished from the court, Autolycus continues to profit from it when the unsuspecting Florizel and Camillo provide him with the means to turn courtier again. His trickery is profitable not only because he has access to the apparel needed to fool others, but also because he can deny the significance of his clothes when necessary. He deceives the clown by claiming that a villain called Autolycus has put the filthy rags he wears on him, controlling the interpretation of his apparel by the unsuspecting gull. Forman's caution against "feined beggars" and "fawninge fellouse" highlights this thematic parallel between the trickster and the courtier. In the end, the rogue, whose past association with the royal family is caused by the court's emphasis on verbal performance, ends up in mock-service to the shepherd and the clown and joins their ranks as a harmless comic figure. His muted responses in the last encounter with the rustics indicate that here too, a performing voice has been transformed. (Carroll, 168-79) The Merchant of Venice is "really" an anti-Semitic play and at the same time shows how ideological critique reduces the interpretative options. "The liberal reading," which makes "the standard liberal move" and furthers oppression, is opposed to "the dissident reading," which sides with "subordinated groups." The "standard liberal move" (Sinfield, 2-17) is, plausibly enough, that of affirming Shylock's "humanity," and it isn't obviously wicked; to show how sinister the move really is, Sinfield recycles Arnold Wesker's argument that no matter how the play is produced, "the image comes through inescapably: the Jew is mercenary and revengeful, sadistic, without pity"-after which any affirmation of Shylock's "humanity" merely "adds insult to injury." (Sinfield, 18-25) It is necessary to trace what could be the point of arguing that this play is really anti-Semitic, and that any affirmation of Shylock's humanity only adds insult to injury After all, such an argument would have no point where it was already taken for granted that the play was anti-Semitic and that this was one of its admirable features. In that notorious production for which Werner Krauss, an actor who frequently appeared in anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda films, was personally selected by Goebbels to play the role of Shylock, there was a clear intention to insult and injure; but it seems most unlikely that anybody thought this end would be achieved, and given a brutally effective twist, by affirming Shylock's humanity. (Ruth, 123-39) Neither would the argument have any more point in Israel, where Shylock's humanity and the wickedness of anti-Semitism are taken for granted, but The Merchant of Venice is "the most performed Shakespearian play": indeed, those who are persuaded by Erich Fried's distressed explanation that "it is quite obvious that the play is being used as a partial justification for Zionism, which is quite as much of a distortion as the Nazis' use of it" might think it is the humanity of the non-Jewish Semite that needs to be affirmed, for example, by having a good Palestinian actor play Shylock. (Elsom, 145) But then Sinfield's argument would have no more point in a society that took the play's anti-Semitism for granted, but for that reason did not admire or perform the play--as in the Hungary described by Anna Fldes: I belong to a generation in Hungary which had never seen The Merchant of Venice on stage until last season, because we felt that after the holocaust, we could not produce that play. Last year, after a lot of discussion, we decided that it need not necessarily be just a tool for anti-Semitism but could show how Shylock came to the crime. Shylock was presented as a man isolated from society, insulted and injured, so that the play was against discrimination and against inhuman behavior on all sides. It was not against the Jews but against all brutality. ( Elsom, 177) Sinfield finds Shylock's Christian "persecutors" hateful we might have expected him to be alert to dramatic or perspectival ironies. Yet what is most curious about Sinfield's view of the play's Christians is not so much its vehemence (where being anti-Christian is presumably not like being anti-Semitic, so long as one is being vehemently anti-anti-Semitic) as his altogether unquestioning assumption that the anti-Semitic Shakespeare couldn't possibly have intended to show his Christians in an ironic or critical light. Practitioners of the Tillyardian method always just know, or divine, osmotically, which of the attitudes expressed by characters are condemned or condoned by the play. That Portia's first extended speech reflects on the difficulty of practicing what one preaches must be ascribed, like Shylock's own bitter reflections on the gulf between Christian principles and Christian practice, to inadvertence on Shakespeare's part. But here the very perfunctoriness of the argument shows how it is merely reactive and instrumental, entirely subordinate to the anti-humanist obsession. Salway goes on to claim that the "fact that traditional literary analysis of the play has avoided" this issue of cultural racism "and pursued such absurd irrelevances as whether or not Othello is truly noble or merely self-dramatizing is itself a sign that the culture of racism has been at work in the very heart of liberal humanism" (116-17). That saber-rattling recalls Sinfield's smearing claim that "the" liberal humanist response to The Merchant of Venice is anti-Semitic: for Salway, "liberal humanism" and "traditional literary analysis" are covertly racist, and they work to perpetuate what Dollimore and Sinfield describe as a "social order that exploits people on grounds of race, gender, sexuality and class" ( Sinfield, viii). Shylock may be traced to the contrast between Shakespeare's compulsive habit of creative interiorization and the almost total absence of any corresponding concern with psychological motivation and the inner dynamics of character and feeling. Shylock is monstrous and that to think otherwise is to sentimentalize--they are allowing that the play had been developing in other, complicated, and complicating ways, and had been prompting a measure of sympathy for Shylock. Works Cited Amazon.com http://www.amazon.com/Shylock-Shakespeare-Kenneth-Gross/dp/0226309770 Carroll, William C. Fat King, Lean Beggar: Representations of Poverty in the Age of Shakespeare (Cornell U. Press, 1996), 168-79. Elsom, John ed., Is Shakespeare Still Our Contemporary ( London and New York: Routledge, 1989), 144-177 Glock Charles Y., and Rodney Stark. Christian Beliefs and Anti-Semitism. New York: Harper and Row, 1966. 144-50 Heller, Agnes. The Absolute Stranger: Shakespeare and the Drama of Failed Assimilation Critical Horizons, Volume 1, Number 1, 2000, BRILL Publishers. pp. 147-167 Kenneth Gross; Shylock Is Shakespeare. (University Of Chicago Press (December 1, 2006) 49-52. Leslie A. Fiedler, The Stranger in Shakespeare (New York: Stein and Day, 1972, 123-31) Oldrieve, Susan, Marginalized Voices in The Merchant of Venice, 5 Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature (1993). p.87 Rosen, Alan. "The Rhetoric of Exclusion: Jew, Moor, and the Boundaries of Discourse in The Merchant of Venice," in Race, Ethnicity, and Power in the Renaissance. Ed., Joyce Green MacDonald Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1997. 89-93 Ruth von Ledebur, "Reading Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice with German Students", in Hanna Scolnicov and Peter Holland , eds., Reading Plays: Interpretation and Reception ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 123-39. Salway, John. "Veritable Negroes and Circumcized Dogs: Racial Disturbances in Shakespeare", in Lesley Aers and Nigel Wheale, eds., Shakespeare in the Changing Curriculum (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 108-24, 116-17 Sinfield, Alan and Dollimore eds., Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press; Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 2-17 Sinfield, Faultlines, 299-300; Arnold Wesker, The Merchant, ed. GlendaLeeming Leeming (London: Methuen, 1983). 18-25 Read More