The Merchant of Venice

The Merchant of Venice is one of the most difficult Shakespeare texts for modern scholars to grapple with. In terms of form, the play resembles many of the playwright’s romantic comedies: It begins with a suitor seeking a woman’s hand in marriage, proceeds with a narrative full of farcical confusion and mistaken identity, and ends with the lovers united.

Yet the character of Shylock complicates things on numerous fronts. For one, Shylock is shown possessing numerous stereotypical qualities that 16th-century Englanders falsely associated with Jews. He is cruel, cunning, and obsessed with his riches. Even worse, according to Jewish actor and Yiddish theater star Jacob Adler, it was not until the 19th century that performers and directors began to emphasize Shylock’s sympathetic qualities. In Shakespeare’s time and for two centuries thereafter, Adler writes, Shylock was routinely played “by a comedian as a repulsive clown or, alternatively, as a monster of unrelieved evil.” (Adler, Jacob. A Life on the Stage: A Memoir. Knopf, 1999.)

Later performances, however—including virtually all versions filmed or staged in the 21st century—frame Shylock as a tragic figure, upsetting the way the play fits into the template of the Shakespearean comedy. Even if the play wasn’t originally staged in this fashion, there is plenty in the text to support this interpretation. When the audience first encounters Shylock, the character makes it clear that his hatred of Antonio is rooted in the merchant’s vocal anti-Semitism. Shylock says, “He hates our sacred nation” (1.3.48), adding, “Cursed be my tribe / If I forgive him!” (1.3.51). This is consistent with a reading of Shylock as a defender of his Jewish community rather than a scourge of local Christians. True, Shylock’s acrimony is also rooted in self-interest; Antonio’s practice of lending money without interest drives down Shylock’s own interest rates. However, given Shylock’s status as a Jew and a second-class citizen in Venice, audiences may forgive Shylock for taking every lawful advantage to support himself and his community.

Indeed, Jews in 16th-century Venice like Shylock faced profoundly destabilizing persecution. In 1516 the Republic of Venice isolated Jews by forcing them to live in one set of neighborhoods that were formally separate from the rest of the city. In addition to being subject to a curfew, Jews were restricted to only two trades: selling secondhand clothes and metal-melting, the latter of which translates to getto in Italian. Thus, “ghetto” was coined to describe the Jewish area of the city, and the term would later be used to refer to other communities isolated from the rest of a city by force or through de facto means, including the Jewish ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe.

Given the legal restrictions on Jewish employment in Venice, the idea of a Venetian Jew skirting the laws of Christianity to engage in usury—the practice of lending money at high interest rates—is implausible. Even outside Venice—including in England where the dominant audience for The Merchant of Venice resided—the notion that high-interest lending was the domain of unscrupulous Jews is an ahistorical stereotype. According to historian Stephen Alford, high-interest lending was a common practice by Christian gentlemen in 16th-century England. In fact, the word “interest” was generally thought of as a euphemism for “usury,” employed to hide violations of Christian law and custom. (Alford, Stephen. London’s Triumph: Merchants, Adventurers, and Money in Shakespeare’s City. Bloomsbury, 2017.)

Alford adds that the tension between merchants like Antonio, who traded in tangible goods, and lenders like Shylock, who built their fortunes on intangible instruments of capital, was very real in 16th-century London. These anxieties persist in the 21st century, expressed though American political slogans like “Main Street versus Wall Street.” However, Shakespeare fuses these anxieties with another set of anxieties common to 16th-century England: anti-Semitism. So no matter how much Shakespeare humanizes Shylock, one cannot escape the fact that The Merchant of Venice perpetuated and extrapolated upon anti-Semitic stereotypes in ways that caused harm for centuries. According to Shakespeare scholar James S. Shapiro, for example, Shylock was a staple of Nazi propaganda. In the late 1930s Germany frequently broadcast radio performances of The Merchant of Venice over its airwaves. (Shapiro, James S. Shakespeare and the Jews. Columbia University Press, 1992.)

This isn’t to say that The Merchant of Venice cannot or should not be read or performed in the 21st century. For example, the Anti-Defamation League, the world’s preeminent Jewish civil rights organization, reserves special praise for director Michael Radford’s 2004 film version of The Merchant of Venice for skillfully and delicately placing the narrative within the context of Renaissance-era anti-Semitism and persecution. (“Anti-Semitism and The Merchant of Venice.” Anti-Defamation League, 12 Aug. 2016.) Moreover, scholars agree that Shakespeare’s portrayal of Shylock is far more nuanced, balanced, and humanizing than, for example, the depictions found in Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, which many view as partial inspiration for The Merchant of Venice. That said, when reading and discussing The Merchant of Venice, audiences would do well to keep in mind Jewish critic Harold Bloom’s view of the play. Bloom writes, “Shylock’s shrewd indictment of Christian hypocrisy delights us, but [...] Shakespeare’s intimations do not alleviate the savagery of his portrait of the Jew.” (Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. Riverhead Books, 1998.) As for whether Shakespeare was an anti-Semite, one can at least say that the playwright had a preternatural sense for the anxieties and passions of Elizabethan England, where anti-Semitism was rampant.