1 - Renaissance England and the Jews

Summary

How many Jews were living in London during the time that Shakespeare wrote The Merchant of Venice? Historically, the question of ‘how many’ has often functioned as a stand in for far less polite assertions about English identity and the imaginative space Jews have occupied within it. Rather than eliciting statements of historical fact, questions about a Jewish presence in Renaissance England instead tend to occasion assertions about who does and does not belong to a desired vision of English culture. In the opening pages of Shakespeare and the Jews, James Shapiro remarks that such questions are ‘poor but necessary substitutes for what is really being fought over: the nature of Englishness itself and who has the right to stake a claim in it.’

Historical claims about the composition of the Renaissance English population have long been bound up with a desire to fashion an account of a ‘pure’ English past free from any vestiges of Jewishness. It was during the Victorian era that a particularly influential narrative took shape that cast Elizabethan England as an era wholly inured to Jewish influence. This same period also saw a robust revival of The Merchant of Venice on the London stage when Henry Irving pioneered his performance of a moving and sympathetic Shylock at the Lyceum theatre in 1879. Irving's humanising interpretation of Shylock's role ran for over 250 performances in its first year alone in England, and managed to garner effusive acclaim while sparking lively debates about its historical accuracy. Irving's interpretation of Shylock galvanised renewed interest in the historical question of Elizabethan attitudes towards Jews. Contemporary debates over Irving's performance emphasized the point that the authentic Elizabethan Shakespeare was thoroughly devoid of any native sympathy for Jews. Ultimately, those debates helped legitimise the fiction of an English past free from affinity for Jews. In 1879, a reviewer for the Spectator called attention to Irving's sympathetic portrayal of Shylock as a novel interpretation, one that differed significantly from Shakespeare's original characterization.