Was Shylock Jewish

Was Shylock Jewish?
Author(s): Emma Smith

Source: Shakespeare Quarterly , Summer 2013, Vol. 64, No. 2 (Summer 2013), pp. 188-219
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24778458
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Was Shylock Jewish?
Emma Smith
EvenMerchant
to ask of
whether Shylock
Venice was was Jewish
first registered may seemRegister
in the Stationers' perverse. After all, The
in July
1598 as "the Marchaunt of Venyce or otherwise called the Iewe of Venyce,"1 and
the title page of its first printed edition of 1600 promised "the extreame crueltie
of Shylocke the Iewe towards the sayd Merchant, in cutting a iust pound of his
flesh."2 The word "Jew" and its cognates are heard more than seventy times in
the play, and in print in both quarto and Folio, Shylock's given name is some
times replaced with the identity "Jew" in stage directions and speech prefixes.3
For critics, readers, theater practitioners, and audiences, the issue of Shylock's
Jewishness and its troubling relation to the genre of romantic comedy the play
attempts to inhabit have been utterly dominant. Almost every critic of The
Merchant of Venice acknowledges Shylock as its most compelling figure, present
in only five scenes and entirely absent from its final act. Elaborating the signifi
cance of his Jewishness has been the key hermeneutic question for readings of
the plav.
In this essay, I will show that some critical assumptions about the play's
Elizabethan context do not stand up to close investigation. Recent criticism has
used a partial and anecdotal version of theatrical and social history to reify
Shylock's "original" cultural and ethnic Jewishness. This work of critical consol
idation can be traced to Henry Irvings influential nineteenth-century produc
tion of the play. Many of the connotations of Jewishness that criticism has
wanted to locate in the early modern period turn out to be symptoms of
I am grateful to Shakespeare Quarterly's reviewers and to Helen Barr, Emily C. Bartels,

Thomas Cartelli, Supriya Chaudhuri, Helen Cooper, Elizabeth Macfarlane, Laurie Maguire,
Martin Orkin, lames Shapiro, Zoë Waxman, and Gill Woods for their advice.
1 Jay L. Halio, ed., The Merchant of Venice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 85. The trans
fer of the rights from James Roberts to Thomas Hayes in October 1600 gives the title as "the m
chant of Venyce."
2 The Most Excellent Historie of the Merchant of Venice (London, 1600).
3 For John Drakakis, "Iewe" was the intended designation in the play's apparatus, and that
only a shortage of italic "I" type forced the compositors of Q1 to shift to "Shyl." See John
Drakakis, ed., The Merchant of Venice (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2010), 420-23, and "few.
Shylock is my name: Speech Prefixes in The Merchant of Venice as Symptoms of the Early
Modern," in Shakespeare and Modernity: Early Modern to Millennium, ed. Hugh Grady
(London: Routledge, 2002), 105-21.

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WAS SHYLOCK JEWISH? 189
Victorian racial "science." This essay takes a series of turn

Irvings production and its immediate reception. Then, I sh
teenth-century scholarship laid the foundation stones of the
pathetic Shylock was unhistorical. The evidence for Shylo
Jewishness was first brought forward in the controversy sur
production. I revisit that evidence—that Shylock is a negative
ter type of the "Jew," that he "looked Jewish" on the Elizabet
recalled anti-Semitic prejudice crystallized by the Lopez affair
given linguistic and other cultural habits appropriate and real
and find that it has very little archival or historical basis. Desp
its assumptions have, as I demonstrate, become axiomatic i
ship, particularly in the editorial apparatus of standard ed
Shylock's strongly Jewish identity has actually served as a po
to Shakespeare's play rather than an a priori essence; further,
that itself can be historicized. I argue that the original legibili
of Shylock's Jewishness have been overstated, and provide an
ical reading in which that Jewishness is contingent rather th
Jew as semantic, rather than as Semitic, property. It is the a
identify the source of certain assumptions about the Elizabet
thereby to draw out what is at stake in our iterative cultural a
racial constitution.
Henry Irving's Merchant of Venice, 1879
If, as Linda Rozmovits has written, The Merchant of Venice "might well be
described as a late Victorian popular obsession," then Henry Irving's production
of the play which opened at the Lyceum Theatre in November 1879 must stand
as its epicenter.4 The production had 250 performances in its first year and hun
dreds more on tour in England and America over the next two decades.5 It has
been estimated that a third of a million spectators saw the production in the
1879-80 season. Irving's characterization of Shylock "as the type of a perse
cuted race'" with the interpolated anguish of his return to his house to find
Jessica gone was remarkable for its pathos and much repeated by later produc
tions.6 Irving himself reported that he was moved to play Shylock by having
observed a dignified "Levantine Jew" while sailing in the Mediterranean. He
4 Linda Rozmovits, Shakespeare and the Politics of Culture in Late Victorian England
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998), 3.
5 James C. Bulman, Shakespeare in Performance: "The Merchant of Venice" (Manchester:
Manchester UP, 1991), 28.
6 Joseph Hatton, Henry Irvings Impressions of America, 2 vols. (London, 1884), 1:265; and
Bulman, 37-38.

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190 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY
wrote to his acting manager Bram Stoker,'"When I saw the J

his own land and in his own dress, Shylock became a very d
began to understand him; and now I want to play the par
His Shylock was widely judged "almost the only gentleman i
was self-consciously revisionist; he wrote, "There is nothing
guage, at any time, that indicates the snuffling usurer w
regard him, and certainly nothing to justify the use the earl
part for the low comedian."8 Throughout, Irvings presen
tragic figure, cruelly wronged in a world of racial intoleran
dignity of'"his belief in his nation and himself,"' as the Satu
even as he left the courtroom.9 "His final exit," wrote t
Spectator, "is the best point. The quiet shrug, the glance
omable contempt at... Gratiano ... the expression of defea
feature, the deep, gasping sigh, as he passes slowly out, and t
the Court to hoot and howl at him outside, make up an ef
seen to be comprehended."10 Richard Foulkes has describe
raphy of the trial scene in Irvings production made Shylock
tion; for a time when the play was revived in the late 1880s
underlined when the whole of Act 5 was cut.11
While much nineteenth-century commentary on the pl
the character of Portia, Irving s sympathetic Shylock decisive
center of gravity. The Spectator began its account of Irvings
by recognizing that the role had accreted strong convention
discarded. Irving was "no 'historical Shylock'": "The comp
Irving presented to a crowd more or less impressed with no
concerning the Jew whom Shakespeare drew, was entir
pected; for here is a man whom none can despise, who can r
of pity and fear, and make us Christians thrill with a re
shame."12 That Irvings Shylock, "whom none can despise," w
torical" is suggestive. A Chicago Tribune review, as Bulman w
righteousness" at the production's assumed anachronism, clai
nineteenth century Shylock ... a creation only possible to
7 Quoted in Bulman, 30-31.

8 Hatton, 266.
9 Quoted in Bulman, 46.
10 See "The Merchant of Venice at the Lyceum," Spectator, 8 Novem
1408.
11 Richard Foulkes, "The Staging of the Trial Scene in Irvings The Merchant of Venice,"
Educational Theatre fournal 28 (1976): 312-17, esp. 317.
12 Spectator, 8 November 1879, 1408.

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pronounced its verdict against medieval cruelty and medieval

Ellen Terry, Irvings Portia, wrote in her memoirs, "Henry Ir
generally conceded to be full of talent and reality, but some
not resist saying that this was not the Jew that Shakespeare
in a position to say what is the Jew that Shakespeare drew? I t
knew as well as most!"14 George Bernard Shaw was less convin
the same point in his review: Irving "gave us, not the Jew that
but the one he ought to have drawn if he had been up to t
(although even Shaw admitted that "the Martyrdom of Irving
confessed, far finer than the Tricking of Shylock").15
The repeated phrase "the Jew that Shakespeare drew" is,
reported verdict on Charles Macklin's coldly villainous Shyloc
in 1741.16 Its reverberation in the discussion of Irvings produ
the fore the pressing question of historical authenticity and,
investigation of the relation between Irvings characterization
by Shakespeare. Magazines, newspapers, and journals becam
pied with the question or Shakespeare and the Jews, attem
Shakespeare's own attitude and to investigate the historical an
of his first audiences. As Rozmovits observes,"But even more
objection that Irvings Shylock was un-Shakespearean was the
not. For, if Irving were right, then the bard of Avon might in
the play as a plea for toleration toward the Jews."17 The result
was to replace Irvings gentlemanly but'unhistorical" theatrica
apparently stabilized, historically and critically authenticated
Semitism. That this is a Victorian invention is perhaps not su
Freedman has discussed the crucial role for the figure of the J
the status and operations of late nineteenth-century high cul
is evident in the post-Irving discussions of Shylocks Jewi
more striking is the extent to which Victorian scholarship
shape late twentieth-century editions and commentary.
13 Bulman, 33.
14 Ellen Terry, The Story of My Life (London, 1922), 186.
15 George Bernard Shaw, Our Theatres in the Nineties, vol. 1 of The Wo
(London: Constable and Co., 1931), 23:286; and Shaw on Shakespeare,
(Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1961), 252.
16 See Charles Edelman, ed., Shakespeare in Production: "The M
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), 36-37; and James Thomas Kirkman, M
Charles Macklin, Esq. (London, 1799), 2:428.
17 Rozmovits, 79.
18 Jonathan Freedman, The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-S
Anglo-America (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000).

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Fost-Irving scholarship: enter L>r. Lopez
Victorian scholarly work to establish Irvings sympathet

thentic because unhistorical proceeded along two major lin
the connection with the Elizabethan physician Roderigo
matic genealogy and visual form for the early modern stage
ing—and constructing—these historical Shylocks as a product
Elizabethan era, scholarship worked to overwrite Irvings s
more authoritative, negative, and anti-Semitic reading of Sha
First was Frederick Hawkins, writing in the Theatre in
suggest that The Merchant of Venice was a reply to the Lopez
eration towards the Jews."19 The influence of Lopez on Shak
zation was elaborated by the young Sidney Lee, writing in
Magazine in 1880. Lee began by acknowledging the reviv
Shylock that Irvings production had prompted. To some ex
pretation was, like Irvings, interested to supply Shylock with
itude, and he asserted that behind Shylock is "the living sem
trader—shrewd and covetous, it is true, but possessed of oth
still more distinctive of his race."20 But the link with Lo
behind Shakespeare's characterization—was also for Lee i
with ideas of Elizabethan anti-Semitism: "No one living in
could have been ignorant of Lopez's history and fate."21
Lee's certainty about Lopez's infamy requires some investig
of the Lopez case is relatively straightforward, although the
spiracy and counterconspiracy in the English, Spanish, and
quickly become befuddling.22 Ruy or Roderigo Lopez, a do
Jewish descent and the Queen's physician, was tried and execu
for an attempt to assassinate her with poison. At his trial Lo
fessed "he is a Jew, though now a false Christian," and the evi
the jury described him as "a perjured murdering traitor,
worse than Judas himself."23
19 Frederick Hawkins, "Shylock and Other Stage Jews," Theatre (

191-98, esp. 193. Shakespeare specialists, including James Spedding and
(both of whom refuted Hawkins's argument), contributed responses in t
"The Character of Shylock," Theatre (1 December 1879): 253-61.
20 S. L. Lee, "The Original of Shylock," Gentleman's Magazine 246 (18
21 Lee, 195.
22 The most complete recent account is by David Katz, Jews in the
1485-1850 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1984), 50-107.
23 Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reign of Elizabeth
Anne Everett Green, 13 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and

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However, Stephen Orgel's skeptical assertion that the rel

affair to The Merchant of Venice is "both dubious and farfe
attention than it has been given.24 David Katz concludes
origin was not a key element in his prosecution," but the
than he allows.25 Any hint of Lopez's Jewishness was actua
pressed in the official publication of the trial proceedings.
the affair repeatedly associates Lopez with Catholicism rat
obviously, since Judaism, unlike Catholicism, was not a po
The account of the trial published in 1594 as A Trv
horrible conspiracies of late time detected to haue (by barb
away the life of the Queenes Most Excellent Maiestie repeate
"a Portingale" and stresses the perfidious role of Philip of
acy: "Lopez . . . confesseth that hee was of late yeeres a
secretly to the King of Spaine."26 There is no reference to h
Many more of the early modern references to Lopez ident
ous papist than a Jew, and at the time of The Merchant
printed source naa îaentinea Lopez asjewisn. '
Over the next couple of decades various references overwhelmingly identify
Lopez with a specifically Catholic threat. The characterization of the physician
Lopus/Ropus in Dekker's sectarian The Whore of Babylon, and Thomas Beard's
exculpation of "that notorious villaine doctor Lopus (the Queens Phisitian)
who a long time had not onely beene an intelligencer to the Pope and King of
Spaine, of our English counsailes, but also had poysoned many Noblemen, and
went about also to poyson the Queene her selfe," are indicative examples.28
Marlowe, whose Jew of Malta is also often linked with the Lopez affair, men
tions him in Dr. Faustus, where it is Lopez's profession, rather than his religion,
that is the source of the joke. Having been tricked out of forty dollars and
doused in the pond, the horse-courser fumes that the cozening Dr. Faustus is
24 Stephen Orgel, Imagining Shakespeare: A History of Texts and Visions (Cambridge:

Cambridge UP, 2003), 149. Lloyd Kermode observes,"There is a consensus among literary his
torians that the Lopez affair strongly influenced the revival and reception of The Jew of Malta
in 1594 and the writing of The Merchant of Venice"; see Lloyd Kermode, ed., Three Renaissance
Usury Plays (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2009), 17.
25 Katz, 106.
26 A Trve report of Sundry horrible conspiracies ... (London, 1594), 7-8.
27 Manuscript sources, in addition to the Calendar of State Papers, include Gabriel Harvey's
marginalia to his copy of In Iudaeorum Medicastrorum calumnias (Speyer, 1570), as transcribed
in Frank Marcham, The Prototype of Shylock: Lopez the Jew Executed 1594. An Opinion by
Gabriel Harvey (Harrow Weald, UK: privately printed, 1927), n.p.
28 Thomas Dekker, The Whore of Babylon (London, 1607); and Thomas Beard, The Theatre
of Gods Iudgements (London, 1597), 222-23.

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worse even than Dr. Lopez: "Dr. Lopus was never such a doctor."29
a scam performance promised at the Swan in 1602 specifically desi
attractive as possible in order to persuade gullible spectators to
might have been expected to offer Jew-baiting were it as popular
pastime as many editors of Shakespeare's play seem to assume.3
trickster Richard Vennar promises, amid representations of
Armada and the titillating suggestion that "the play will be acted o
gentlemen and gentlewomen,""Lopus, and certaine Iesuites."31 Aga
ing feature of Lopez is his conspiratorial alliance with Spain an
rather than his own religious identity.32The strength of the strat
cized association of Lopez with Catholicism was remarked by the J
Henry Garnett in a letter to Father Robert Persons in Septem
plaining that Lopez's trial had been "greatly derived to the discredit
although most unjustly," and remarking darkly that Lopez "knew n
world, nor was acquainted with any Catholics in England that I kn
There are some scattered print references to Lopez as a Jew,
postdate The Merchant of Venice. William Warners verse hist
England (1596) recalls "That Spanish-Iewish, Atheist, and Lop-h
Leach, / (Unworthy a Physitions name) fowle Lopas" a formula
Spanishness, atheism, and the breaking of the Hippocratic oa
Jewishness to capture Lopez's perfidy.34 An illustration in Geo
1627 edition of his Thankfvll Remembrance of Gods Mercy shows
demic dress talking to a man in a Spanish ruff and beaver wit
"Lopez conspiring to poyson the Queene": in the account of th
Lopez is called "a Jew" on a single occasion, and his nefarious d
uted to the intriguing conflation "Romish Rabbies"3i In John
"The Churches Deliuerances," Lopez is identified as "by descen
29 Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, in The Complete Works of Christoph

Roma Gill, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987-98), 10.36.
30 On Vennar, see Tiffany Stern, Documents of Performance in Early M
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009), 71-72. Bevington argues that "anti-Semi
were likely to erupt into hysteria at any time" (180).
31 John Chamberlain, The Letters of John Chamberlain, ed. Norman E
(Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1939), 1:172; and "The Plot of
Englands Joy," in The Elizabethan Playhouse and Other Studies, Second Series, e
(Stratford-upon-Avon: Shakespeare Head Press, 1913), 68.
32 On Vennar's own links with the Lopez affair, see Herbert Berry, "R
England's Joy," English Literary Renaissance 31 (2008): 240-65, esp. 250.
33 Quoted by Alan Stewart, "The Birth of a National Biography: The Li
Lopez, Solomon Lazarus Levi and Sidney Let','EnterText 3 (2003): 183-203,
34 William Warner, Albions England (London, 1596), 244.
35 George Carleton, A Thankfvll Remembrance of Gods Mercy (London, 16

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Portingal by birth" who "Would poyson [the Queen] to furth

tion."36 Nowhere in the immediate aftermath of the trial or in
accreted over later retellings for different purposes does Lo
dominate the story.
Although Lee's account was factually incorrect and confuse
impact was far reaching. And, as Alan Stewart has written, t
byline,"S. L. Lee," represented a significant intermediate stage in
of Solomon Lazarus Lee, son of a Jewish merchant, as the En
scholar Sidney Lee, the name he used exclusively from around 1
points out that Lopez's Jewishness is less significant for Shyloc
himself, who wrote when so-called "scientific" anti-Semitism w
England and Germany: "Might it not be that Lee's identification
only as a Jew but as a victim of anti-Semitism draws on very c
ing concerns within the Anglo-Jewish political and intellectual
1879?"38 Stewart's recognition that the association of Shylock a
presentist rather than historical work for Lee is instructive. Bu
ing to see Irvings portrayal implicitly challenged, even unde
largely invented and reactive parable of Elizabethan anti-Semiti
For more recent critics, especially the editors of standard text
has been irresistible to produce the Lopez case as the explici
supplement to The Merchant of Venice. In the Norton Shakespe
Eisaman Maus writes that "shortly before Shakespeare wrote Th
Venice, an outpouring of anti-Semitic outrage was triggere
Roderigo Lopez, a Portuguese Jewish convert to Christia
attempting to murder Queen Elizabeth"; David Bevington int
in his Complete Works by stating that in the early modern per
superstitions were likely to erupt into hysteria at any time" and
case as the only example. For Jay Halio in the Oxford edition, S
"something to the notoriety" of Lopez.39 The apparent clarity of
functions in these accounts as kind of perverse relief from the
cate and evasive sympathies. Lee's concept of Lopez has become
the differences between his own entry on Dr. Lopez for the or
36 [John Taylor], All the Workes of lohn Taylor the Water-Poet (London,
37 Stewart, 197-98; see also Alan Bell and Katherine Duncan-Jones, "
(1859-1926)," in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. M
Harrison (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004); online ed., ed, Lawrence Goldman
http://www.oxforddnb.com/ view/article/34470 (accessed February 7 20
38 Stewart, 197-98.
39 Halio, 7; see also Stephen Greenblatt, gen. ed., The Norton Shakespe
Oxford Edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 1111; and David Bevi
Complete Works of Shakespeare, 6th ed. (New York: Longman, 2009), 180.

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of National Biography and that of Edgar Samuel a century later fo

Dictionary of National Biography. For Lee, "Lopez's reputation, and
excitement evoked by his trial, may possibly have directed Shakes
tion to that study of Jewish character which he supplied about th
'Merchant of Venice'"; Samuel asserts that "William Shakespeare
writing and staging The Merchant of Venice with its murderous J
ter, Shylock, who hates all Christians."40 In the more recent biogr
ciation between Lopez and a caricatured account of The Merchant o
taken on the quality of fact.
The Invention of Elizabethan Staging Practices
Like Lee's argument about connections between Lopez and Shylock, t

temporary scholarly attempt to historicize Shakespeare's play in the conte
the early modern theater was a response to Irvings interpretation of the
William Poel's productions of The Merchant of Venice in 1898 and 1907 as
of his project to return to assumed Elizabethan staging practices repr
Shylock as a comic villain in a red wig and hooked nose.41 This visualizatio
its scholarly rationale in Elmer Edgar Stoll's essay "Shylock," published in
Stoll developed the historical contextualization for this invented tradit
maintained that Shakespeare's "intention"—"the only matter of importanc
was toward "rude caricature and boisterous burlesque." Stoll wrote, "It is h
probable, moreover, that Shylock wore the red hair and beard... from the
ning, as well as the bottle-nose of Barabas" and that it is therefore "highl
able ... that Shylock wore ... red hair and beard."42 For Stoll, Irvings "H
picturesqueness and pathos" obscured a more savage comic Elizabethan
convention: "we have tamed and domesticated the dog Jew' and draw
'fangs. " In order to experience "the lively prejudices of the time," modern
tions should echo these Elizabethan conventions, "except at popular pe
ances, where racial antipathy is rather to be allayed than fomented."43
40 S[idney] L[ee], "Lopez, Roderigo (d 1594), Jewish physician," in Dictionary of N

Biography (1893) reprinted in DNB Archive, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (
Oxford UP, 2004-13), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/olddnb/17011 (accessed 2
2013); and Edgar Samuel, "Lopez, Roderigo (c.1517-1594)," Oxford Dictionary of N
Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004); onl
ed. Lawrence Goldman, January 2008, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/
(accessed 7 February 2013).
41 [William Poel], William Poel and His Stage Productions, 1880-1932 (n.pl., n.d.), B
Library MS Adds 129 d 112; Edelman, Shakespeare in Production, 36-37; and Bulman
42 Elmer Edgar Stoll/'Shylock," Journal of English and Germanic Philology 10 (1911):
esp. 238, 246.
43 Stoll, 236, 278.

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Again, the evidence for Stoll's certainty about Elizabetha

deserves a second look. Often this assumption is attributed to
for example, Halio asserts, "Since medieval mystery and mira
Judas with red beard and hair and a large nose, later stage-Jew
In fact, no documentary evidence exists to attest to Judas's a
earlier plays. Only in the York Plays, performed during the
teenth centuries, is Judas described as specifically bearded bu
cation about the color.45 Accounts for the performance of J
cal nacrpant TTip T)p<trurtinn nf Jpru<alptn in Onvpnrrv in 1 c>84 inrlndp. amnncr
payments for musicians and for the players' breakfasts and ale, two shillings and
sixpence for beards, perhaps to costume Jewish characters, but again no color is
mentioned.46 Ruth Mellinkoff cites a single Continental example for a red
bearded Judas in the drama. In the Lucerne passion play of 1588, Judas is
described in the costume list with "rott lang har vnd bart."47 Given the sparce
ness of the evidence, Frederick Wood's citation of the York cycle as evidence
that "the conventional Judas of the mysteries wore a red grisly beard which after
wards became the traditional sign of the villainous stage Jew" is bewilderingly
definite.48 And red beards also appear in earlier drama with no apparent Jewish
connotation: the six masquers who "enter in pesute of Mynde, with rede berdys"
in Wisdom are part of an elaborately costumed exploration of feudal allegiance
and aristocratic abuses, which, while it may signal demonic affiliation, has no
evident religious or racial one.49
The additional passages, possibly by Ben Jonson, written for Thomas Kyd's
Spanish Tragedy and first published in 1602, do include the line "let their
beardes be of Iudas his owne collour."50 Understandably, given the thorough
44 Halio, ed., 10n.

45 Richard Beadle, ed., The York Plays (London: Edward Arnold, 1982), 26.167. On the per
formance of the York and other mystery cycles, see Helen Cooper, Shakespeare and the Medieval
World (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2010), 156-61.
46 R. W. Ingram, ed., Records of Early English Drama: Coventry (Toronto: U of Toronto P,
1981), 304; quoted in Paulina Kewes, "Jewish History and Christian Providence in Elizabethan
England: The Contexts of Thomas Legge's Solymitana Clades (The Destruction of Jerusalem),
c.1579-88," in Style: Essays on Renaissance Poetics and Culture, ed. Allen Michie and Eric
Buckley (Newark: U of Delaware P, 2005), 228-66, esp. 253.
47 Ruth Mellinkoff, Outcasts: Signs of Otherness in Northern European Art of the Late Middle
Ages, 2 vols. (Berkeley: U of California P, 1993), 1:153.
48 Frederick T. Wood, "The Comic Elements in the English Mystery Plays," Neophilologus 25
(1940): 194-206, esp. 199.
49 Wisdom, in Greg Walker, ed., Medieval Drama: An Anthology (Maiden, MA: Blackwell,
2000), 235-57, 692 sd. Walker notes that red beards are "traditionally Judas's colour," but does
not explain what this might signify in the pageant of pride or"Deullys dance" (238n).
50 Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragédie (London, 1602), sig. H4r. See also Frank Felsenstein,
"Jews and Devils: Anti-Semitic Stereotypes of Late Medieval and Renaissance England,'"Journal

103.18.3.232 on Sun, 20 Jun 2021 13:42:52 UTC
going theatrical self-reflexivity of the play, this reference has te

as a comment on dramatic performance. In fact it occurs in
Hieronimo's conversation with the Painter, as he commissio
synesthetic portrait of his sons murder. The reference to Judas
ularly appropriate to the iconography of pictorial art. As Mellin
fied, northern European art from the fourteenth to the sixteenth
depicted Judas with red hair: Hieronimo's line in The Spanish
Oxford English Dictionary's earliest citation of the phrase "Juda
does not provide evidence that the iconographie tradition pas
into theatrical arts.51 In any case, the most common signifier of
medieval art was a hat: a topos that is entirely absent from t
Elizabethan stage representations.52
Alle ULI1CI lICl^UCIlLiy CllCU. UUlUULCIll Uli OliyiUCI*. J> pUULLlVC d.ppCd.1 illlCC jl& uy
Thomas Jordan, an actor in the later Stuart period. In 1664, Jordan published
a volume of ballad poetry entitled A Royal Arbor of Loyal Poesie (the title of the
work implies that an accurate description of Elizabethan drama was not his
main concern). Included in it is a poem often inaccurately cited as a description
of The Merchant of Venice in early modern performance. In fact, the ballad is
entitled "The Forfeiture: A Romance," and while it tells of a Jew in Venice with
a daughter it does not mention Shakespeare, quote from the play, or name any
of its characters. It also no reference to caskets and gives an account of a trial
scene in which "The Doctor proves [the Jew's] Daughter,"53 thus conflating
Shakespeare's Jessica and Portia. It postdates Elizabethan performances by
almost seventy years: Jordan himself was not born until almost twenty years
after The Merchant of Venice was written, and the conclusion of his ballad
apparently has more to do with the contemporary readmission of the Jews to
England than with the Elizabethan theater: "I wish such Jews may never come
/ To England nor to London."54 It would seem, therefore, that using its physical
description of the Jew—"His beard was red" and "his chin turn'd up, his nose
hung down, / And both ends met together"55—as evidence for early modern
of Literature and Theology 4 (1990): 15-28, esp. 19; and Philip Edwards, ed., The Spanish
Tragedy (Manchester: Revels Plays, 1991), lxi-lxiv.
51 Ruth Mellinkoff, "Judas's Red Hair and the Jews "Journal of Jewish Art 9 (1982): 31-46, esp.
45; and OED Online (Oxford: Oxford UP, March 2013), hhttp://www.oed.com/view/Entry/
101874?redirectedFrom=judas-colour#eid40216548 (this and all OED Online definitions
accessed 29 May 2013), s.w."Judas, ».," and "Judas-colour, adj."
52 Debra Higgs Strickland, Saracens, Demons, and Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art
(Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003), 105.
53 Thomas Jordan, A Royal Arbor of Loyal Poesie (London, 1664), sig. Cc4r.
54 Jordan, sig. Cc54v.
55 Jordan, sig. Cc3r.

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Staging practices is distinctly shaky.56 These lines give Stoll th

essay. A similarly unreliable source is the additional lines t
Burbage added in the early nineteenth century by the forger Jo
"the red-hair'd Jew, / Which sought the bankrupt merchants p
By woman-lawyer caught in his own mesh."57 In an interesting
in his stage history of Shylock, Toby Lelyveld acknowledges
faked, but adds that this "does not, of course, indicate that Shy
not red. The chances are it that was."58 Lelyveld and Collier—li
scholars—clearly want the same thing: a red-bearded Shylo
Grafton's identification of the "structural resemblance" between
icism59 is instructive here: both Collier's forgery and the criti
Shylock's caricatured appearance are belated but purposefu
actively shaping the evidence to produce their desired historica
Jordan's post-Restoration description of the Jew includes a d
hooked nose, and many critics assume that the Elizabethan Shy
worn a distinctive false or "bottle" nose (that the meanings
"hooked" nose are not consistent shows something of the overin
fictional"Jewish nose"). In Tudor drama such as Lewis Wager
taunce of Marie Magdalene (1566) or Ulpian Fulwell's Like W
a bottle nose was a mark of the devil, in the repeated phra
knave."60 But there seems to have been no inevitable lexical con
sixteenth century between the bottle nose and the Jew.61 In T
Ithamore describes Barabas as "the bravest, gravest, secret, sub
knave to my Master, that ever Gentleman had" (3.3.9-11), echoi
associations of this physiognomy rather than any specificall
tions.62 Roma Gill's gloss that "in early drama the Jewish p
56 Jordan, sig. D2v-D4v.

57 J. Payne Collier, Memoirs of the Principal Actors in the Plays of Sh
Shakespeare Society, 1846), 53. On Collier's additions to the Burbage e
Freeman and Janet Ing Freeman, John Payne Collier: Scholarship and Forger
Century (New Haven: Yale UP, 2004), 267.
58 Toby Lelyveld, Shylock on the Stage (London: Routledge and Kegan Pau
59 Anthony Grafton, Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in We
(London: Collins and Brown, 1990), 125.
60 Lewis Wager, A New enterlude, neuer before this tyme imprinted, entrea
repentaunce of Marie Magdalene (London, 1566), sig. F2v; and Ulpian Fulwe
lude, intituled, Like will to like (London, 1587), sig. A3r.
61 The OED glosses simply as "a nose resembling a bottle, a swollen nose"
typing. OED Online, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/21916?redirected
eid, s.v."botde-nose,
62 Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta, in The Complete Works of Ch
vol. 4 (see n. 29 above). All subsequent references to this play are taken from

103.18.3.232 on Sun, 20 Jun 2021 13:42:52 UTC
attributed to the devil" shows a troubling investment in the ine

invented racial trope as Jewish first and only by extension devi
from theater history is that the bottle nose—and perhaps the r
is in fact a prior characteristic of the devil, and only later, and
times, associated with Jewishness.
A pamphlet by William Rowley in 1609 describes a usurer as a k
with "his visage (or vizard) like the artificiall Iewe of Maltaes nose."64
that Barabas wore a false nose, it does not tell us anything about
a tendency to read the bottle nose as a sign of Barabas's Jewishnes
cartoonish villainy (or to assume that the Elizabethan period cou
sustain this distinction between wickedness and Tewishness). As I will discuss
below, while there is equivalence in later drama between a usurer and a big nose,
the linking term "Jew" is always missing. The pragmatic Jaquine in Chapman's Blind
Beggar of Alexandria urges her mistress Samathis to accept the usurer Leon's suit:
"'Tis no matter for his nose, for he is rich." Duke Cleanthes seems to have put on a
nose to play a usurer, but no one labels him as Jewish. Mammon in Marston's Jack
Drum's Entertainment is described "with a great nose," but again there is no refer
ence to Jewishness. When Jean Howard sees Pisaro, the Portuguese moneylender
in William Haughton's play Englishmen for My Money (1598) as "unmistakably
coded as a Jew" by mention of his '"bottle-nose"' because of "a bottlenose being a
common stage property of Jewish characters," she overstates the legibility of the
stereotype.65 Pisaro is never identified in the play as Jewish, and while he may recall
the popular Barabas on the stage of the Rose Theater, there is no evidence that his
nose is part of an extensive history of stage Jews, still less that it is connected to
Shylock. That the trope of the large nose on the stage so completely signals
Jewishness that there is no need to even mention it is not proven: Jewishness and
usury are, and should be recognized as, separate categories. Peter Berek regards this
process of separation in the plays by Haughton, Chapman, and Marston as the
"unjewing' of the imitations of Barabas and Shylock" in "debased form": "It was
what the actor did on the stage and not the opportunity to contemplate a Jew that
generated such amusement as audiences found in these plays."66 What might also
be true is that these comic signifiers were not so closely tied to racial types as later
criticism has assumed. In visual art, Strickland writes, a "hooked nose" was used for
a number of evil characters; it "is another reason not to see an exaggerated, hooked
63 Gill, ed., 112.

64 William Rowley, All for Money (London, 1609), sig. C2v.
65 Jean E. Howard, Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy, 1598-1642 (Phila
delphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2007), 44.
66 Peter Berek,"TheJew as Renaissance Man," Renaissance Quarterly 51 (1998): 128-62, esp.
158-59.

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nose solely as a mark of Jewishness."67 On the stage, a mask wi

the distinguishing mark of Pantalone in the commedia dell'a
avaricious patriarch associated with daughters and often pa
lawyer figure called Gratiano.68
In addition, early modern accounts of Jewish people do no
Thomas Coryate, for example, helpfully glosses "our English
a Iewe," writing, "whereby is meant sometimes a weather beaten
sometimes a phrenticke and lunaticke person, sometimes o
These are negative attributes, to be sure, but they do not includ
of the racial typing later spuriously classified in the "science" o
Shapiro has observed that early modern illustrations do no
cally different from Christians (this is the burden of Coryate's
in Venice, whose appearance does not fit the proverb) and th
not represent Jews with distinctive physical traits until well in
tury"70 The bottle nose or hooked nose, then, seems to deriv
tury ideas about racial typing rather than sixteenth-century
investigation of the cultural work of nineteenth-century ph
that the métonymie construction of the "Jew" was a concer
"Jewish nose" "an important fiction on which all physiogn
rated" precisely at the point when Jewish social mobility an
meant "the Jew began to blend in with the crowd."71 Poel's
tices and their critical consolidation as historical fact are, lik
neologism "anti-Semitism," inflected with the racial assumption
The paucity of early modern references to specific visual sig
suggests that Portias question in the courtroom "Which is th
which the Jew?" (4.1.171) is a real one.73
67 Strickland, 78.
68 K. M. Lea, Italian Popular Comedy: A Study in the Commedia dell
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), 1:25. See also John Robert Moore,
Boston Public Library Quarterly 1 (1949): 33-42.
69 Thomas Coryate, Coryats Crudities (London, 1611), 232.
70 James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia U
Bale, "The Jew in Profile," New Medieval Literatures 8 (2006): 125-5
cation: "The Jew in profile... forms a radical continuity between the M
tieth century" (150).
71 Sharrona Pearl, About Face: Physiognomy in Nineteenth-Century
Harvard UP, 2010), 143-44.
72 The OED's first citations of "anti-Semitism," "anti-Semitic," and "a
1881-82. See OED Online, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/8854
Semitism#eid, s.v. "anti-Semitism, n."
73 All references to Shakespeare's plays are taken from Stanley Wel
eds., The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, 2nd ed. (Oxford:

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Nevertheless, the idea that the original Shylock wore a pro

nose, red wig, or beard has had a remarkable durability in comm
editions of the play. Jay Halio states in his introduction to the
that "Shakespeare's initial conception of him was essentially as a
most likely adorned with a red wig and beard and a bottle no
acknowledges that there is no internal evidence for this. D
claims, "On the Elizabethan stage, he apparently wore a red b
and had a hooked nose." John Gross echoes this, writin
Elizabethan audience, the fiery red wig that he almost certain
out his ancestry."74
onyiocKS original appearance was tne suoject or a revealing recenc
exchange of letters between Stephen Greenblatt and James Shapi
New York Review of Books. In a review of a production of The Me
Venice, Greenblatt had repeated the assertion that "in the earliest prod
Shylock was played with a bright red wig and a grotesque hooked
was in appearance the wicked Jew of anti-Semitic fantasy, one
hideous faces that leer at the suffering Jesus in paintings by Hie
Bosch."75 Shapiro claimed that the source of this myth of red
Collier's now-discredited forgery, to which Greenblatt counte
Jordan's "highly probable glimpse of Shylock's early stage appearance."
Shapiro replied again questioning Jordan's authority and claiming
mental disagreement about what constitutes historical evidence for
ing Shakespeare's life and works," Greenblatt's answer was
Acknowledging that the issue of Shylock's original appearance is di
ascertain, Greenblatt nevertheless put the matter beyond doubt: "D
Shapiro or anyone else actually believe that there is no stage h
grotesquely stereotyped Shylocks?"77 Evidential arguments that Sh
not depicted in terms of grotesque racial stereotypes appear to be l
to the critical story of The Merchant of Venice than the conviction sp
attributed to the play's original depiction.
74 Halio, 10; Bevington, 180; John Gross, Shylock: Four Hundred Years in the Life
(London; Chatto & Windus, 1992), 16.
75 Stephen Greenblatt, "Shakespeare & Shylock," New York Review of Books (30
2010), http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/sep/30/shakespeare-shy
nation=false (accessed 29 May 2013).
76 James Shapiro, reply by Stephen Greenblatt, "Shylock in Red?" in New York
Books (14 October 2010), http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/oct/
red/?pagination= false (accessed 29 May 2013).
77 James Shapiro, reply by Stephen Greenblatt, "Shylock on Stage and Page,"
Review of Books (9 December 2010), http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archiv
dec/09/shylock-stage-and-page/?pagination=false (accessed 29 May 2013), empha

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The Stage Jew
Stoibs other substantial intervention into the question of

on the Elizabethan stage was his construction of a dra
Jewish characters in the drama. This survey reveals "in va
usurer and miser, villain and butt, devourer of Christia
limb of the devil, all big-nosed, or foul-breathed, in accor
error,—in some fashion or other egregiouslyJewy [sic]"78
on an existing and negative literary and theatrical caricatu
since Stoll, become a commonplace in introductions to s
scholarly editions. Maus asserts that "depictions of fiendish
medieval and Renaissance drama; the villainous protag
Marlowe's Jew of Malta, a popular success in the early 159
precedent."79 M. M. Mahood's introduction to the Camb
Merchant of Venice invokes "the wicked Jewish money
phrase echoed by Halio, who wonders "if Shylock is anothe
lainous Jewish money-lender."80
In fact, Jewish characters in drama before The Merchan
and sufficiently diverse to compromise any claim that the
able stereotype.81 In the miracle plays, for instance, while
inevitably marked out for obloquy, the Jewishness of the
them does not equal moral turpitude, and Tudor interlu
subjects, such as Jacob and Esau (1568) and Abraham's Sa
no judgments about the religion of their protagonists.82 P
that Thomas Legge's manuscript play Solymitana Clad
strates "an attitude of qualified empathy" with its Je
Moneylenders, too, are rarities in the literature before Th
Robert Greene and Thomas Lodges biblical A Looking G
England (circa 1593) includes a merciless usurer who will n
of his debt because the clock has just struck the due hour:
of his religion. When Cleanthes appears in the disguise o
78 Stoll, 246-47.
79 Norton, 1111.
80
M. M. Mahood, ed., The Merchant of Venice (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987), 21; and
Halio, ed., 9.
81 See Charles Edelman, "Which Is the Jew that Shakespeare Knew? Shylock on the
Elizabethan Stage" Shakespeare Survey 52 (1999): 99-106.
82 A newe mery and wittie comedie or interlude ... of Iacoh and Esau (London, 1568); and A
tragédie of Abrahams sacrifice (London, 1577).
83 Kewes, 254. Legge's production notes describe historically authentic costuming for his
Jewish characters.

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Chapman's The Blind Beggar of Alexandria (circa 1596) the adje

to him is "rich," never "Jewishand his religion is not an issue. On
ferentially Jewish characters predate Shylock in the public theater
Robert Wilson's The Three Ladies of London (1584), Abrah
Greene's Selimus (circa 1590), and Barabas in Marlowe's The Traged
few of Malta (circa 1589).84
Robert Wilson's Gerontus in The Three Ladies of London offers
Shylock prototype: Gerontus is a Jewish moneylender in Turkey
money by a Christian merchant—the familiar sum of three thous
three months—and he goes to court to recover his debt. However,
with The Merchant of Venice end there, for Gerontus is marked by
care for his unscrupulous debtor Mercadore. The play is the didact
power of Lady Lucre to draw all men to her:
For Lucar men come from Italy, Barbary, Turky,

From Jury: nay the Pagan himselfe
Indaungers his bodie to gape for her pelfe.
They forsake mother, Prince, Country, Religion, kiffe and kinne,
And men care not what they forsake, so Lady Lucar they winne.
(sig. A2v)85
Mercadore, an Italian merchant, is one of her conquests, and

engages him to export on her behalf "Wheate, Pease, Barly, Oates,
and all kinde of graine," and 'Leather, Tallow, Beefe, Bacon, Belme
thing." In return, "for these good commodities, trifles to England
bryng. / As Bugles to make babies, coloured bones, glasse, be
brace-lettes withall" (sig. B2v). Mercadore borrows the money to f
from Gerontus, who, having repeatedly asked for its repayme
recourse. Mercadore resolves to convert to Islam and thus expunge
will be a Türke."
Gerontus tries to persuade him to reconsider: "I cannot think
sake your faith so lightly" (sig. E3r). As the Judge begins to hear
conversion, Gerontus intervenes: "Stay there most puissant J
Mercadorus, consider what you doo, / Pay me the principal, as for
I forgive it you" (sig. Fr).When Mercadore rejects this offer, Gero
84 George Chapman, The blinde begger of Alexandria (London, 1598); Rjob

right excellent and famous comedy called the three ladies of London (Londo
Greene], The First part of the Most Tyrannical Tragédie and Raigne of Selimu
and Christopher Marlowe, The Tragedy of the Rich lew of Malta (London, 16
85 R[obert] W[ilson], A right excellent and famous Comoedy called the three
(London, 1584). Quotations from The Three Ladies will be made in the text b

103.18.3.232 on Sun, 20 Jun 2021 13:42:52 UTC
WAS SHYLOCKJEWISH? 205
"Then pay me the one hälfe, if you will not pay me all"
Mercadore will not be dissuaded. Gerontus relents:
I would be loth to heare the people say, it was long of me

Thou forsakest thy faith, wherefore I forgive thee franke and free:
Protesting before the Judge and all the world, never to demaund peny
nor halfepeny.
(sig. Fr)
The Judge points out that plaintiff and prosecutor have exchanged their religious
and moral affiliations: "One may judge and speak truth, as appeares by this, /
Jewes seeke to excel in Christianitie, and Christians in Jewishnes" (sig. Fr).
That the only Jewish moneylender on the Elizabethan stage before Shylock
is a man of conscience, who respects the Christian religion of his debtor more
than he desires the legal return of his loan, has been strangely problematic for
many scholars. Peter Holland, introducing the Penguin edition, claims that
"there was no shortage of Jewish villains to offset this apparently lone example
of Jewish goodness," although he gives only Marlowe's Barabas in support.86 M.
J. Landa can only grudgingly allow that Gerontus "is by no means a bad fellow"
in his study The Jew in Drama, since his thesis is that "open the book of dra
matic representation at whatever page you choose, you will find on it the figure
of the Jew, sinister in his evil-doing, uncouth in his appearance, at best a carica
ture of a man."87 In arguing for the centrality of anti-Semitism in modern
European culture, Matthew Biberman advises that "it is wrong to read Gerontus
in a straight (non-ironic) way as a good character," since to do so "redeems the
English Renaissance from the charge of blanket anti-Semitism."88 Citing
Wilsons play, Jay Halio immediately discounts it in favor of other nondramatic
antecedents, most notably Thomas Nashes prose fiction The Unfortunate
Traveller (1594) and its depiction of "the scoundrels Zadoch and Zachary"
who are "much more like what we might expect"89 The expectation of wicked
Jewishness seems here to be a modern, rather than an early modern, phenome
non, a back projection which overlays an attestable dramatic history with an
imagined (expected) anti-Semitic one.
Janet Adelman discusses The Three Ladies of London at more length in a
wonderfully subtle and illuminating account of The Merchant of Venice
informed by the historical presence of converso Jews in early modern London
86 Peter Holland, ed., The Merchant of Venice (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 2005), xxxiii.
87 M.J. Landa, The Jew in Drama (London: P. S. King & Son, 1926), 54, 9.
Matthew Biberman, Masculinity, Anti-Semitism and Early Modern English Literature: From
the Satanic to the Effeminate Jew (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004), 23.
89 Halio, ed., 6 (emphasis added).

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and explicitly and humanely framed by her own "perspective as a

Adelmans reaction to the image of Gerontus is striking. Appa
tralize the problematic charge of his positive image, she ident
character in the play, Usury, as also Jewish. Thus the two Jewish
in the play are counterbalanced: "The Jewish usurer in England
suringly) the embodiment of foreign evil."91 Usury is presented i
Ladies of London as a bloodsucking moneylender. He murders H
previously lived in Venice, serves Lady Lucre in her unscrup
with merchants and tenants, and is one "that hath undone ma
man, / And daily seekes to destroy, deface, and bring to ruin
C3r), But it must be noted that there is no hint whatsoever in
Usury is Jewish—unless we assume that to be a ruthless moneylen
to be Jewish. As Lady Conscience wails, "Usurie is made toller
Christians as a necessary thing" (sig. D4v): Usury is of the city
alien from it. The Three Ladies of London is not subtle in its char
rkirorfPfe it*<> pmnliit-irolltr mfmrlnrorl um rU i i;icm1 innAifinro rr\nennont
with their characterization (Simplicity the miller, for example, enter

mealy") and are named and described by other characters and themselv
their entrance ("my good freend Fraude"; "I knowe thee, thou
Dissimulation"; "heere comes ... a Lawyer"; "I am an Attorney of the L
(sigs. A3r—v, B3v). Adelman's contention that the play "does not explic
identify this transplanted Venetian Usury as a Jew, but the play's audi
would have had no trouble making the connection" is out of step with the p
overtly declarative representational mode. Adelman discounts the eviden
the play and instead reconstructs the "wicked Jewish moneylender" stereot
as something "reassuring."92
The message of The Three Ladies of London is that Lady Lucre's pow
threatens to corrupt the entire city. A sequel in 1590—significantly, postda
the Spanish Armada and the initial stage success of Marlowe's Barabas—
more obviously xenophobic in its attempt to identify this pervasive m
threat with foreigners. In The Three Lords and Ladies of London, Usury is g
Jewish parentage, in a speech identifying all the play's villains as outsid
Accused of treachery to his country, Simony crows: "Tis not our native
trie, thou knowest, I Simony am a Roman. Dissimulation a Mongrel, hal
Italian, hälfe a Dutchman, Fraud so too, hälfe French, and hälfe Scottish
90 Janet Adelman, Blood Relations: Christian and Jew in "The Merchant of Venice" (Chica
of Chicago P, 2008), ix.
91 Adelman, 17.
92 Adelman, 13.

103.18.3.232 on Sun, 20 Jun 2021 13:42:52 UTC
thy parentes were both Iewes, though thou wert borne i

Adelman, this belated identification of Usury as Jewish "w
no surprise to the audience," but what is important is that
Jewishness postdates his appearance in The Three Ladies of Lo
identity has been already preempted by the named Jew Ge
tive importance of Gerontus's charity in Three Ladies also
weighs this single reference in the sequel play. Lloyd Kermod
"the Three Ladies' connection with Venice would already
Usury's 'Jewishness' before Three Lords' confirmation of tha
wise proleptic, and risks being circular: it is Shakespeare's lat
established for us as inevitable the relation between Venice an
lenders, and there is no reason to suppose that this associa
Merchant of Venice.94 Conspicuous here is the strenuous c
explain away Gerontus's generosity and to minimize its im
understanding of audience expectations of Shvlock.
Greenes play Selimus has been similarly distorted to provide
wicked Jewish stereotype. The play is based on the early sixt
tory of the Ottoman empire and the violent overthrow of
Selimus. It is true that Abraham the Jew is commissioned by
his father and that Abraham takes up the task even though h
alty to Selimus nor animus toward Bajazet. But Abraham
appearances, is on stage for a matter of minutes, speaks only
finally decides to share the poisoned cup with his victim beca
and has "not many months to live on earth."95 More significan
is a play of such spectacular brutality that it is willful to read
a poisoning Jew as significant: Selimus's own severing of the h
to Bajazeth, indicates that ruthlessness is in no way equivalen
this play. Abrahams work is rather restrained and dignified i
these baroque excesses.
Finally, then, the case of Marlowe's play published in 1633
the Rich Jew of Malta. Marlowe's Jewish protagonist, Bar
embracing the hyperbolic wickedness attributed to the Jews
Semitic libels. He boasts
93 The Pleasant and stately Morall, of the three Lordes and three Ladies of London (London,
1590), sig. F4.
94 Adelman, 14; and Lloyd Edward Kermode, ed., Three Renaissance Usury Plays (Man
chester: Manchester UP, 2009), 36.
95 Selimus, Emperor of the Turks, in Daniel J. Vitkus, ed., Three Turk Plays from Early Modern
England (New York: Columbia UP, 2000), 18.85.

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I walke abroad a nights

And kill sicke people groaning under walls:
Sometimes I goe about and poison wells.
(2.3.175-77)
Barabas claims to have "studied Physicke," worked as a military engineer, spy, and
"an Usurer" (2.3.182-91). He has "set Christian villages on fire" and attacked pil
grims to Jerusalem (2.3.204). As his Moorish servant Ithamore exclaims, "We
are villaines both: / Both circumcised, we hate Christians both" (2.3.215-16).
The allusion to crucifying a child (3.6.49) and murdering nuns in the Friary
place Barabas amid the blood libels of late medieval anti-Semitism.96 For Harold
Bloom, this deliberate and exaggerated performance of anti-Semitism cancels its
charge: "Barabas of course is a superbly outrageous representation of a Jew; he is
no more Jewish than Marlowe's Christians are Christians or his Muslims are
Muslims."97 Emily C. Bartels sees that "instead of being the Jew, Barabas strategi
cally plays the Jew—or rather, the various Jews, which others fabricate"; "he plays
the Jew... his spectators want and need to see, a Jew who ironically tells us more
about them than about him."98 While Bartels implies an available "type" of the
stage Jew that Barabas raids for his own improvisatory self-presentation—a type
for which is it is hard to find evidence—her view of Barabas as a product of audi
ence desire provides an important measure for assessing his critical appropria
tion. The extent to which the radically individual Barabas persists as a stereotype
in accounts of stage Jews shows that he remains the Jew we "want and need to
see," even while his terrible charisma exceeds such racial and dramatic typing. As
the play's "most energetic and inventive force,"99 Barabas, with his triumphant
amorality and engaging, sardonic performance to the audience, is more evident
in Shakespeare's Richard III than in The Merchant of Venice. To put it another
way, Jewishness is only a part, and perhaps only even a minor part, of the signif
icance of Barabas's characterization for Shakespeare.
These stage histories, purporting to lead up to The Merchant of Venice,
emerge as back projections from the play. Setting out the history of marked
Jewish characters on the stage before Shylock does not support the assumption
that Elizabethan audiences were primed to expect a wicked stereotype, or even
that such a stereotype can be traced.
96 See Felsenstein, 15-28.

97 Harold Bloom, ed., Major Literary Characters: Shylock (New York: Chelsea House
Publishers, 1991), 6.
98 Emily C. Bartels, Spectacles of Strangeness: Imperialism, Alienation, and Marlowe
(Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1993), 100, 106.
99 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Marlowe (Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 1980), 204.

fff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff on Thu, 01 Jan 1976 12:34:56 UTC
Stoll and Poel responded to Irvings tragic stage Shyloc

grotesquely stereotyped "Elizabethan" villain in his place; L
ing out the authentic Jewishness of Shakespeare's prototy
cases, Shylock's Jewishness—in appearance, influence,
propped up with material outside the play. Eric Hobsb
invented tradition as "a set of practices, normally governed
accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which see
values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which autom
tinuity with the past."100 The negative and caricatu
Elizabethan stage seems such an invented tradition. Th
scholarly narrative appears to reiterate and perversely nor
tition an anti-Semitic stereotype is deeply problematic
bottle-nosed Shylock and his monstrous dramatic tribe are
structed after the fact in direct response to Irvings more
tation: they have proved troublingly resistant to revision.
OHYLOCK, 1 UBAL, AND THE (JLD I ESTAMENT
One final aspect of Shylock's character has often been taken to signal his
intrinsic and deeply characterized Jewishness: his citation of Old Testament
scripture, or what Julia Reinhard Lupton calls his "Jewish hermeneutics."101 In
revisiting the case for this assumption, I propose an alternative reading of the
play's deployment of Jewishness as metaphor.
M. M. Mahood notes that in The Merchant of Venice Shakespeare deliber
ately developed his biblical knowledge in order to characterize Shylock: "to get
at these origins and so to endow Shylock with his pride of race, Shakespeare
naturally went to the stories of the patriarchs told in the Book of Genesis."102
While the story of Laban from Genesis 30 is used in Shylock's extensive speech
in his first scene to figure usurious lending, in fact most of Shylock's biblical ref
erences are to the New Testament rather than the Old, and some of his most
resonant phraseology comes from Christian rather than Hebrew scripture.103
To take examples from his first entrance in Act 1, "peril of waters" (1.3.24)
draws on 2 Corinthians 11:26, "I was often in perils of waters"; his aside "to
smell pork; to eat of the habitation which your prophet the Nazarite conjured
100 Eric Hobsbawm and T. J. Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1983), 1.
101 Julia Reinhard Lupton, "Exegesis, Mimesis and the Future of Humanism in The Merchant
of Venice" Religion and Literature 32 (2000): 123-39, esp. 125.
102 Mahood, ed., 197.
103 Quotations from the Geneva Bible are taken from Lloyd E. Berry, ed., The Geneva Bible:
A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1969).

103.18.3.232 on Sun, 20 Jun 2021 13:42:52 UTC
the devil into" (1.3.31-33), draws on the gospels of Luke, Matth

and the unfamiliar word"Nazarite" (1.3.32) comes from Matthew
on Antonio as a "publican" (1.3.39) derives from Luke 18; "he ha
nation" comes from Luke 7:5; "for use of that which is mine
echoes Matthew 20:15. If Shylock's language is steeped in the N
the language of the Christians borrows extensively from the O
Lancelot Gobbo (whose standardized name in modern editions
initial relation to the Old Testament figure of Job) and his father
27 in their misrecognition scene in 2.2. Portias "quality of mercy"
its biblical antecedents in Deuteronomy, Ecclesiasticus, and Is
assumed identity as Balthasar echoes the name given to the pro
the book of Daniel. Shylock's confiscated property is ironical
Lorenzo as "manna" (5.1.294), the food given to the Israelites in ex
of God's favor in Exodus 16.104 While The Merchant of Venice is a
biblical allusion, it is hard to make the allusions form into the neat
sition of Old Law and New in terms of their respective theologica
or to shape the play's biblical references into the supersessionist a
defeat of the Old Testament Shylock / Judaism by the New Testa
Christianity.105
Richmond Noble wrote of The Merchant of Venice that it wa
which Shakespeare very evidently taxed his scriptural knowledge,"
ble result of that strain was that two of the three "defects in Shak
cal knowledge" across his canon come from the play. The first is t
reading, relatively widespread in the period, of "Sabaoth"—the
for"hosts" or'armies"—as a synonym for'sabbath" (4.1.35). The s
substantial, the choice of "Chus and Tubal as Countrymen of S
writes that "as names of Hebrews, Shakespeare cannot be said
happy in his choice in either case."106
Shylock refers to "Tubal" as "a wealthy Hebrew of my tribe" (1.
lend to him some of the money to be lent to Antonio. Tubal come
Act 3, scene 1, to bring the piercing news of Jessicas antics in Ge
has spent in "one night fourscore ducats" (3.1.100-101). Shyloc
meet him with an officer "at our synagogue" (1. 120). In the next
104 These references are indebted to Naseeb Shaheen's discussion of the p

References in Shakespeare's Plays (Newark: U of Delaware P, 1999), 156—83.
105 The most elegant argument for the Old/New Testament binary is b
Lewalski, "Biblical Allusion and Allegory in The Merchant of Venice" Shakespe
(1962): 327-43, esp. 338.
106 Richmond Noble, Shakespeare's Biblical Knowledge and Use of the Book of
as Exemplified in the Plays of the First Folio (London: SPCK, 1935), 96, 99, 1

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eloped to Belmont, reports that she had heard her father "sw
Chus, his countrymen" that he would prefer the bond's forfei
of "twenty times" Antonio's death (3.2.282-85). The text, th
Tubal and Chus as other members of Venice's Jewish commun
ars have struggled to identify a convincing Hebrew etymolog
Orgel notes that it was an English name—so too these names h
wanting.107 Naseeb Shaheen's observation that "neither Tubal
ically Jewish, as are names such as Isaac, Jacob, Zadok or Eph
way to identifying the particular strangeness of these names
tion of different races.108 But there is further to go.
As Colin Kidd has shown, early modern ethnology took
digm for understanding "mankind's family tree" the descript
sion of peoples in Genesis 10 and 11 as amplified by the w
Josephus, translated into English at the end of the sixteenth
orthodox mainstream of early modern Protestant anthrop
enquiry led back to Noah. Ultimately, race and ethnicity invo
pedigree: did an ethnic group descend from the line of H
Japhet?"109 It is from this much-cited Ur-text of scriptur
Shakespeare takes his problematically atypical Jewish nam
That Chus, son of Noahs son Ham, was seen as the pro
Africans has been discussed by Kim F. Hall in an importan
the associations of Shylock with "blackness, forbidden sexuali
ful appropriation of property." Hall's landmark study has rea
ently inconsequential remark from Lorenzo to Lancelot Go
with child by you" (3.5.37)—and opened up the play's "int
nexus of anxieties over gender, race, religion, and economics.
vincingly shown that Chus's name and its associations are not
meanings of The Merchant of Venice: they participate in
dynamic of "otherness" and its conflation of sexual and econo
Tubals associations have not had similar attention but can also
the play's historical context and its address to its initial audie
107 Orgel, 151. Orgel notes that "Leah, Tubal and Chus" have "immediat
lical names" (151) but does not develop this observation further.
108 Shaheen, 161.
109 Colin Kidd, The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protest
1600-2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006), 58. See also Benjamin B
Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in th
Modern Periods," William and Mary Quarterly 54 (1997): 103-42.
110 Kim F. Hall, "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? Colonization and M
Merchant of Venice" Renaissance Drama 23 (1992): 87-111, esp. 101, 89.

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If from Chus, son of Ham, as the Geneva Bible gloss puts

Ethiopians & Egyptians," then from Tubal, son of Japhet, cam
divided in their landes, everie man after his tongue, and after t
their nacions" (Genesis 10:5). When Tubal is mentioned in Eze
gloss, in both the Geneva and Bishops' Bibles, is even cleare
Cappadocians & Italians, or Spanyardes, as Josephus writeth."The
Noah stood at the head of humanity's tripartite division, bet
descendants of Shem), Africans (the descendants of Ham
European Gentiles (Japhet via Tubal). Shakespeare refers to Japh
runner of the Gentiles in 2 Henry IV, when Prince Henry remar
like all petitioners, Falstaff claims a common heritage with the
be kin to us, but they will fetch it from Japhet" (2.2.109-10). Th
then, carries strong connections to the divided and multiple rac
Gentiles derived from the foundational biblical history of Noah'
Jews and Strangers
There are a number of reasons why, in the mid-1590s, Shak

have wanted to invoke as the most prominent of Shylock's Jewish
a biblical figure strongly associated with the lineage of the
Gentiles of Europe. Just as Hall has drawn out associations b
and blackness in the play via the reference to Chus, so the f
allows us to connect the play's depiction of otherness not prim
temporary attitudes to and representations of Jewishness but w
European economic and religious migrants in Elizabethan Lon
of trade, credit, mercantilism, value, and cultural difference
Merchant of Venice is so concerned were clearly issues of consid
in the London of the 1590s, but they were not primarily articul
to the category of Jew.
That there was a small community of converted Jews living in
tury London is clear from the work of pioneering scholars early
eth century including Lucien Woolf, Sidney Lee, and C. J. Sis
ible or visible the identity of members of this community as Je
111 Lucien Wolf, "Jews in Elizabethan England," Transactions of the Jewish H

(1926): 1-91, which claims "an identified Jewish community of between eight
living in the England of Good Queen Bess" (19); C.J. Sisson,"A Colony of Jew
London," Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association 23 (Oxfor
1938), 38-51; and Adelman, 1-10. On the interest of early modern Engl
Israelites, see Achsah Guibbory, Christian Identity, Jews, and Israel in Sev
England (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010); and Sharon Achinstein, "John Foxe
Renaissance Quarterly 54 (2001): 86-120.

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clear, and the case that Elizabethans really actively car

Jewishness—as opposed to biblical typology—is not p
Jewishness necessarily reviled. The case in Chancery in 1
widow Mary May and two Portuguese merchants, and dis
provides important evidence. May argued in court that th
business partners of her late husband, "were Jews, and pract
that their services as agents were interfered with by this fac
ness was Thomas Wilson, a former servant of one of the a
Alvares. Wilson described in some detail the household's Passover obser
vances: in "supersticious ceremonyes" they "did make Saterday their Sunday"
and "light a great wax candle and sett the same in a basen with 4 white loaves
about the Candle in the myddest of a great roome." The court agreed with
Mays case that the men were indeed Jews, but their response was compassion
ate, encouraging her to forgo some of her entitlement, "beinge moved with the
losses and trobles which the poore Straungers indured perswaded Mrs May
being present to deale charitably with Alvares in regarde thereof."112 That the
discovery of the men's Jewishness did not apparently prompt fear, punishment,
derision, or any other negative reaction is striking, and all the more so if we
speculate about what would happen were details of a secret Catholic mass in
London in 1596 laid before the authorities. Felsenstein describes how from
"the nearly complete ignorance or misunderstanding of Jewish ritual," "it was
but a short step to cast Jewish ritual in a diabolized mould"; but the court case
here does not indicate any such slippage.113 Nor is there evidence from English
travel writing, as Yaacov Deutsch contends. Deutsch points out that Fynes
Moryson's matter-of-fact description of a circumcision he attended in Prague
in 1592, in which "the author refrains from voicing any criticism," was not
unusual among contemporary writers.114 Charles Edelman's moderate sugges
tion that "most, or at least some, Elizabethans did not feel all that strongly
about Jews," contrasts with the extensive and resonant evidence about the trou
blesome presence of European aliens in London at the end of Elizabeth's
reign.115 Alongside the amplified commentary about Shylock's Jewishness we
might propose this as another historical context. The Merchant of Venice's
questions about cultural friction in a cosmopolitan city might be reframed
within local debates about the integration of immigrants, particularly
112 Sisson, 41, 45, 51.

113 See Felsenstein, 24.
114
Yaacov Deutsch, Judaism in Christian Eyes: Ethnographic Descriptions of Jews and Judaism
in Early Modern Europe, trans. Avi Aronsky (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012), 166-67.
115 Charles Edelman, "Which Is the Jew that Shakespeare Drew?" in Shakespeare Survey 52
(1999): 99-106, esp. 102.

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Huguenot refugees from France and the Low Countries, into L

mercial, financial, and social fabric.
Economic and religious factors drove waves of immigration from
Europe to England in the second half of the sixteenth century, an
comprised a population of between four and five thousand in Lond
out Elizabeth's reign.116 Public discourse about alien immigratio
tion is frequently prosecuted in terms that impinge on those of Th
Venice. The status of Protestant immigrants, their economic w
quences of endogamous or exogamous marriages for immigrant
and the thorn of separate churches for the French and Dutch map
the situation of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice:"! will buy with
you, talk with you, walk with you, and so following; but I will not
drink with you, nor pray with you" (1.3.33-35).117 In addition, an
alence between London and Venice was often proposed. Speaking in
in 1593 opposing a bill "against Aliens selling by way of retail
Commodities," Sir John Woolley argued that "this Bill should be i
for the Riches and Renown of the City cometh by entertaining of
giving liberty unto them. Antwerp and Venice could never have b
famous but by entertaining of Strangers, and by that means have
intercourse of the World."118 The analogy between London and Ve
mercial city-states was a common one. Other speakers in the p
debate followed Woolley's comparison, convinced that just as Venic
had grown by welcoming immigrants, so too would London's.119
If Venice and London were connected in the discussions about im
so too were Jews and "strangers" to the city. In an important corre
Guibbory has explored the role of Jews in early modern discourse
or always—the dangerous or despised Other," writing that the Refo
in typological hermeneutics meant that the Old Testament Israelites
with whom early modern Christians seemed to identify."120 T
Hebrew scriptures in the debates about the place of immigrants in
116 Laura Hunt Yungblut, Strangers Settled Here amongst Us: Policies, Per
Presence of Aliens in Elizabethan England (London: Routledge, 1996), 21.
117 See Andrew Pettegree, Foreign Protestant Communities in Sixteenth-C
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986).
118 Sir Simonds D' Ewes, A compleat journal of the votes, speeches and debates, b
of Lords and House of Commons throughout the whole reign of Queen Elizabeth, of
(London, 1693), 505-6.
119 On the comparison between London and Venice, see Carole Levin and
Shakespeare's Foreign Worlds: National and Transnational Identities in the
(Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2009), 112-40.
120 Guibbory, 3, vi.

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London simultaneously identifies "a sense of affiliation and em

ancient Jews" existing alongside suspicion and antipathy, in an
nation-state struggling for independence from papal authority a
national identity."121 Preaching in Oxford on "mens hard hearts to s
mid 1590s, George Abbott, later archbishop of Canterbury, recall
complaining that "by a most inhospitall kinde of phrase, our En
terme them, no better then French dogs, that fled hither for R
conscience sake." Abbott enjoins his audience to remember "the
which God gave to the Israelites, to deale well with all straungers,
once was, when themselves were straungers in that cruell land of
English recalling their own religious exile during the period of
Queene Maries dayes," Jews had been both hosts and strangers.1
associate and fellow Stratford migrant, Richard Field, printed A
sermons. Such biblical injunctions to tolerance were preempted
published in 1595 as a "Complaint of the Yeomen Weavers Agains
Weavers": "in all well-governed Comonwealthes the natyve born
before the Straunger. Though the Israelite sufferred the Co
amongst them, yet not without being Contributories.
Commaunded by God not to doe the Straunger wronge, soe wee a
take injurye at their handes." The text cites the Old Testament
port.123 The Deuteronomic experience of the nation of Israel in
codes of belonging was cited both by those seeking to assuage a
anti-alien sentiment: Jews were significant and resonant rhetori
discourse of early modern English xenophobia.
The most prominent association of Jews with aliens in c
London comes from the Dutch Church Libel of 1593, a toxic br
strangers "that doth excead the rest in lewdnes," according to th
posted at the Dutch Church in Threadneedle Street.124 This libe
Ye strangers yt doe inhabite in this lande

Note this same writing doe it understand
and takes up anti-Semitism as an available metaphor for th

sentiment:
121 Guibbory, 13.

122 George Abbott, An Exposition upon the Prophet lonah Contained in certaine sermons,
preached in S. Maries Church in Oxford (London, 1600), 84, 87, 88.
123 The complaint is quoted in full in Francis Consitt, The London Weavers' Company
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933), 312-18, 314.
124 John Roche Dasent, ed., Acts of the Privy Council of England, New Series, 46 vols. (London:
HMSO, 1890-1964), vol. 24 (1592-93), 222.

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Your usery doth leave us all for deade
Your Artifex, & craftesman works our fate,
And like the Jewes, you eate us up as bread.
Biblical history is invoked: "Egipts plagues vext not the Egyptians

you doe us." The libel alludes to the French wars of religion betwe
and Catholic: "nor paris massacre so much blood did spill," and
ingly, "Weele cutt your throtes, in your temples praying."125 Its pr
world of the theater is clear. It is signed "Tamburlaine," and
Marlowe and Kyd were fatally drawn into the official inquiry
nance. As Shapiro points out, its rhetoric, with its reference to a
Merchant" and "counterfeiting religion," circles around allusions t
Malta, performed earlier that year.
I he libel is an extended warning advocating forcible anti-al
protectionism.126 The structural balance of that simile "like the J
us up as bread" has tended to be overwhelmed by a critical focus o
than Protestant immigrants. Anti-Jewish rhetoric is a clearly avail
the writer of the libel, but modern scholarships preoccupations ha
the historically denotative subject—immigrants—with the connota
object of comparison—Jews. Shapiro's analysis that the libel"provi
able example of how the alien threat shifts easily into anti-Jew
risks such a disturbance of connotative and denotative syntax.1
representation of anti-Semitism is more important to us than atti
Protestant migrants, "like the Jewes" constantly exceeds its subor
historical—syntax of similitude. In fact the idea that Jewishness m
rative rather than essential is a common thread in Shakespeare's li
ment of the term outside The Merchant of Venice. The imaginary
in Benedick's "If I do not love her, I am a Jew" (Much Ado A
2.3.250-51), or 1 Henry IVs "Every man of them, or I am a
Hebrew Jew" (2.5.179-80) offer up the identity of "Jew" as a r
struction in order to construe the speaker's own behavior (ther
half-echo of this substitutive rhetorical externalization in Sh
extended comparisons in his "Hath not a Jew eyes" speech [3.1.5
that "Jew" might be an adjective rather than a noun—an attribute
which does not always or only denote religion or race—is com
125 Arthur Freeman, "Marlowe, Kyd, and the Dutch Church Libel," Eng
Renaissance 3 (1973): 50-51.
126 See Andrew Ortony, Metaphor and Thought, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Camb
342-56, esp. 343.
127 James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia UP, 1996)

103.18.3.232 on Sun, 20 Jun 2021 13:42:52 UTC
modem English.128 It is this usage that prevents FalstafF's

from becoming entirely tautological.
Many of the rhetorical associations of Jewishness and us
actually enact a separation between Jewish people and the ad
Thomas Wilsons Discourse of Usury (1572) simultaneously a
the connection between usury and religious Jewishness. He
the cause the Jews "were hated in England and so banyshe
whom I woulde wyshe all these Englishmen were sent that l
their goods whatsoever for gayne,* for I take them to be
Nay, shall I saye: they are worse than Iewes."129 Thomas D
"Christian Jews" in The Dead Term (1608), just as the Turk
of Wilsons Three Ladies of London notes that the adjective
have been switched by the behaviors of Mercadore an
Tawney—along with Shakespeare's own biography—dem
that Elizabethan moneylending was "not a profession but a b
Thus the early modern association between Jews and mone
always a knowing fiction. Jonathan Gil Harris's observation
Jew in early modern discourse is "a far less transparent cate
is usually assumed is relevant here.132 In the early modern
"Jew" had become at least partially detached from the racia
with which it is now firmly associated.
While for the twenty-first century, the history and th
Jewishness are, rightly, politically and ideologically charged
conduct the thought experiment into an Elizabethan w
migration was far more pressing. It was more politically u
publicly as a Jesuit than a Jew. As Edmund Campos writes
Lopez case, "Some aspects of English anti-Semitism can be
posed anti-Hispanic racism."133 For Shakespeare, Jewishnes
an actually less problematic term than more immediate form
128 David Hawkes discusses a number of examples of this usage in T

Renaissance England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 67-71.
129 Thomas Wilson, A Discourse upon Usury, intro. R. H, Tawne
Sons, 1925), 232.
130 Thomas Dekker, The Dead Tearme (London, 1608) sig. Cv.
131 Wilson, 21. On Shakespeare lending money, see S. Schoenbaum,
Documentary Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 182-84.
132 Jonathan Gil Harris, Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and
England (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2005), 71.
133 Edmund Valentine Campos, "Jews, Spaniards, and Portingales:
Portuguese Marranos in Elizabethan England," English Literary Hi
esp. 602.

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of Sir Thomas More, after all, had been censored for dramatizing
and much of the Master of the Revels's attention to the problems
located in the detail of its identification of the strangers. Two o
script interventions turn the words "stranger" and "Frenchman
neutral "Lombard."134 Mores own speech attempting to quell
draws on terms familiar from The Merchant of Venice and ofte
interpreted there as having particularly scriptural relevanc
between Christian and Jew.135 In what Jeffrey Masten calls "cros
More threatens that the rioters will themselves be exiled where t
"whet their detested knives against your throats, / Spurn
(6.149-50).136 The theater had invented a type of comic, he
Dutch or French foreigner to rework the alien threat. The relat
this figure on the early modern stage compared to that of t
137
instructive/
G. K. Hunter has written that the figure of the Jew as "infidel outsid
had the general effect of stilling internal European oppositions and stressi
unity of Christendom."138 By contrast, the play hints at a di
Christendom using the figure of the Jew and Noachic ethnology, in
nationality rubs fretfully against religious affiliation. The aliens in Lond
well have been Protestants, and many were refugees from the wars of reli
continental Europe, but they had separate, specially licensed church
complaints against them stressed their religious separatism. A petition fr
Weavers' Company to the Elders of the Dutch and French churches, c
ing about anticompetitive practices, questioned whether such foreign wo
were Christians at all: "Nowe we beseech you enter into your owne Consc
and saie whether wee be wronged or noe, or whether thei men deale Chr
like with us, as they ought to doe. What love, what Charitye, or what Re
134 John Jowett, ed., Sir Thomas More (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2011), 45-46.
135 See, for example, Noble, 97.
136 Jeffery Masten, "More or Less: Editing the Collaborative," Shakespeare Studies 2
109-31, esp. 118.
137 Wilson O. Clough lists more than fifteen plays predating The Merchant of Venice
characters'broken English indicates they are European outsiders in an English context;
Broken English of Foreign Characters of the Elizabethan Stage," Philological Quart
(1933): 255-68. See also A.J. Hoenselaars, Images of Englishmen and Foreigners in th
of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries: A Study of Stage Characters and National Id
English Renaissance Drama, 1558-1642 (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 19
Lloyd Edward Kermode, Aliens and Englishness in Elizabethan Drama (Cambridge: C
UP, 2009).
138 G. K. Hunter, Dramatic Identities and Cultural Tradition: Studies in Shakespeare
Contemporaries (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1978), 24.

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WA S ÇHYT orte TP.WISH? 21 9
is in this?"139 Immigration was a dangerously t

able onomastic associations not with the Je
Gentile peoples hints at the ways in which Th
read to address through analogy contemporary
living. That The Merchant of Venice might s
aliens in London is not new. But it is poigna
maintaining that Shylock represents the Hugue
the Review of English Studies in 1929, almost th
tury at which we could possibly entertain the
tic rather than Semitic—a metaphor, not an ess
i ne question is not wnetner inyiocK is a muguenot, ana my argument aoes
not attempt simply to replace Shylock-as-Jew with Shylock-as-immigrant.
Those repeated instances of the word "Jew" in The Merchant of Venice exceed
this interpretative framework, but the point is that they also exceed an exclusive
focus on modern or early modern constructions of Jewishness. Rather, other
circumstances and other histories can be read into the play and the exclusive
focus on Shylock's original Jewishness is a product of nineteenth-century rather
than sixteenth-century epistemologies. Henry Irvings sympathetic stage
Shylock prompted a paroxysm of scholarly activity invested in reconstructing
the play's original context as deeply anti-Semitic; modern scholarship has
tended unquestioningly to repeat the central procedures and conclusions of this
problematic investigation. Perhaps, as Bernard Grebanier wrote,"Far too much
has been made of Shylock's being Jewish."142 We know some of the terrible cul
tural work undertaken by destructively anti-Semitic readings of Shylock's
Jewishness today and in the centuries since Shakespeare.143 Deessentializing the
early modern figure of the Jew by investigating unfounded assumptions about
his role, antecedents, and reception in the Elizabethan theater and by challeng
ing their repetition in modern scholarship offers a tiny piece of restitution.
139 Consitt, 314.

140 See Gillian Woods/"Strange Discourse': The Controversial Subject of Sir Thomas More"
Renaissance Drama 39 (2010): 3-36.
141 Andrew Tretiak, "The Merchant of Venice and the Alien Question," Review of English
Studies 5 (1929): 402-9.
142 Bernard Grebanier, "The Truth about Shylock" (1962), reprinted in Major Literary
Characters (see n. 97 above), 202-11.
143 See Gross, 287-309.

103.18.3.232 on Sun, 20 Jun 2021 13:42:52 UTC

Was Shylock Jewish

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Was Shylock Jewish

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Was Shylock Jewish?

Author(s): Emma Smith

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24778458

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I am grateful to Shakespeare Quarterly's reviewers and to Helen Barr, Emily C. Bartels,

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Victorian racial "science." This essay takes a series of turn

Henry Irving's Merchant of Venice, 1879

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wrote to his acting manager Bram Stoker,'"When I saw the J

7 Quoted in Bulman, 30-31.

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pronounced its verdict against medieval cruelty and medieval

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Victorian scholarly work to establish Irvings sympathet

19 Frederick Hawkins, "Shylock and Other Stage Jews," Theatre (

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However, Stephen Orgel's skeptical assertion that the rel

24 Stephen Orgel, Imagining Shakespeare: A History of Texts and Visions (Cambridge:

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29 Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, in The Complete Works of Christoph

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Portingal by birth" who "Would poyson [the Queen] to furth

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of National Biography and that of Edgar Samuel a century later fo

The Invention of Elizabethan Staging Practices

Like Lee's argument about connections between Lopez and Shylock, t

40 S[idney] L[ee], "Lopez, Roderigo (d 1594), Jewish physician," in Dictionary of N

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Again, the evidence for Stoll's certainty about Elizabetha

44 Halio, ed., 10n.

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going theatrical self-reflexivity of the play, this reference has te

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Staging practices is distinctly shaky.56 These lines give Stoll th

56 Jordan, sig. D2v-D4v.

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attributed to the devil" shows a troubling investment in the ine

63 Gill, ed., 112.

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nose solely as a mark of Jewishness."67 On the stage, a mask wi

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Nevertheless, the idea that the original Shylock wore a pro

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The Stage Jew

Stoibs other substantial intervention into the question of

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Chapman's The Blind Beggar of Alexandria (circa 1596) the adje

For Lucar men come from Italy, Barbary, Turky,

Mercadore, an Italian merchant, is one of her conquests, and

84 George Chapman, The blinde begger of Alexandria (London, 1598); Rjob

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I would be loth to heare the people say, it was long of me

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and explicitly and humanely framed by her own "perspective as a

with their characterization (Simplicity the miller, for example, enter

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thy parentes were both Iewes, though thou wert borne i

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I walke abroad a nights

96 See Felsenstein, 15-28.

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