Which is the Jew that Shakespeare Knew?: Shylock on the Elizabethan Stage

Summary

As John Gross remarks in Shylock: Four Hundred Years in the Life of a Legend, 'everyone who writes about the stage history of The Merchant of Venice is doomed to quote, sooner or later', the couplet supposedly spoken by Alexander Pope upon seeing Charles Macklin's portrayal in 1741:

This is the Jew

That Shakespeare drew.

Pope's comment shows that he considered Macklin's hard and bitterly malevolent interpretation to be a welcome corrective to the Shylock of Thomas Doggett and his successors in George Granville's adaptation, The Jew of Venice, a lurid burlesque of the role that had held the stage since 1701. It also shows a yearning, shared by all students of the play, to reconstruct somehow the first Shylock, about whom there is no reliable contemporary information whatsoever - the actor Thomas Jordan's doggerel description,

His beard was red . . .

His habit was a Jewish gown,

That would defend all weather;

His chin turned up, his nose hung down,

And both ends met together

dates from 1664, when the theatre was not, contrary to the view of E. E. Stoll, 'still swayed by the tradition of Alleyn and Burbage'.