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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2024
The history of the interpretations of The Merchant of Venice, both on the stage and in critical comment, and of the reactions it has evoked in its readers or viewers, is surely unique in the Shakespeare canon. Interpretations of Hamlet are numberless, but the contentions expend themselves within the intellectual realm. The Merchant of Venice reaches down into deep emotional levels, involving commitments and shrouded reticences of the soul. When conscience and the play come together, a drama takes place. Sigurd Burckhardt has clearly perceived the problem, without exploring it. “Audiences,” he writes, “persist in feeling distressed by Shylock's final treatment, and no amount of historical explanation helps them over their unease.” We cannot join unreservedly in the joyful harmonies of the last act. “Shylock spooks in the background, an unappeased ghost.”
1 S. Burckhardt, "The Merchant of Venice: The Gentle Bond," ELH 29 (1962), p. 239.
2 For Elizabethans, see among other accounts, J.W. Hales, "Shakespeare and the Jews," EHR, 9 (1894), pp. 652-61, and Raymond M. Alden, Shakespeare (New York: 1922), p. 212: "The Elizabethan audience despised him [Shylock], and were quite untroubled… By the same token, they had no fear that Antonio, in his treatment of the Jew, did not quite exhibit the spirit becoming to a Christian." Most commentators agree that Shakespeare, desiring to write a successful play and perhaps prompted by his own company to the topical theme (topical because of the Lopez affair and Marlowe's success), fed his audience's prejudices. Whether he had hidden deeper intentions is an unanswerable element in the controversy.
3 e.g., Thomas Lounsbury, George Saintsbury, Charles H. Gray, George Gordon (who is, however, overtly hostile to Shylock as a Jew), Judd Brown, Camille Looten, Tyrone Guthrie, G.W. Knight, Robert G. Hunter, Peter Alex ander, Terence Hawkes, W.W. Lawrence, Ralph Berry, L.S. Champion.
4 I use the French word which combines "conscience" and "consciousness."
5 Richard G. Moulton, The Moral System of Shakespeare (New York: 1903), pp. 313-317.
6 Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist (Oxford: 1885), pp. 47-84.
7 H.W. Mabie, William Shakespeare, Poet, Dramatist, and Man (New York: 1912), pp. 252-254.
8 Shakespeare's Workmanship (Cambridge: 1944), pp. 70-88. Cf. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and John Davis Wilson, eds., The MV (Cambridge; 1926). pp. XIV-XVII.
9 Brents Sterling, ed., MV (Baltimore: 1969), pp. 211-212.
10 Other adherents to this generalized attitude include A. Dimock, "The Conspiracy of Dr. Lopez," EHR, 9 (1894), pp. 440-72; H.L. Withers, ed., MV (Boston: 1899), pp. XVIII-XIX; Louis Teeter, "Scholarship and The Art of Criticism," ELH, 5 (1938), 104; David Galloway, Shakespeare (Toronto: 1961), pp. 34-35; W. Moelwyn-Merchant, ed., MV (London: 1967), pp. 26-27 (according to whom, apparently, Shakespeare puts Shylock and Antonio on a par, as flawed by racial antipathies.
11 H.W. Simon, ed., MV (New York: 1940), pp. XXIV-XXVI.
12 H.B. Charlton, Shakespearean Comedy (New York: 1940), pp. 123-40. Charlton states that Jessica is obtuse to the moral significance of her actions (p. 156). But the question is whether this is so in the value system of this joyous play. He points out that Portia is blind to Shylock's motives and state of mind. But again the nub lies elsewhere: should one try to understand the agony of a Jew?
13 H.T. Coleridge, Shakespearean Criticism, ed. T.M. Raysor (London and New York, 1960), I, p. 55, 200.
14 Harold Ford, Shakespeare, His Ethical Teaching (London, n.d.), pp. 83-90. A similar view was expressed by J. Cumming Walters ("The Jew that Shake speare Drew," Manchester Quarterly, 24 (1905) pp. 124-39). Walters soothes the conscience of Christians by making Shakespeare even-handed and ironical, but he is avowedly embarrassed that Shakespeare should have written such a play.
15 W.A. Nielson and C.J. Hill, eds., The Complete-Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare (Cambridge, Mass.: 1942), p. 116. G.L. Kittredge, ed., The Complete Works of Shakespeare (Boston: 1936) p. 238. Nielson claims that it was the seduction of Jessica that made Shylock vengeful. He does not note that this deed is not presented, nor was taken by the Christians in the play, as an injury. H.R. Walley's takes up, in modified form, Kittredge's untenable argument that Shakespeare was no more attacking the Jews in MV than he was attacking the Moors, Spaniards, Italians, Viennese or Danes in other plays. ("Shakespeare's Portrayal of Shylock," in Essays in Dramatic Literature, ed. Hardin Craig, Princeton, 1935, pp. 213-242).
16 G.B. Harrison, ed., Shakespeare, The Complete Works (New York: 1948), p. 582.
17 M.A. Eaton, ed., MV (Boston, 1909), p. 8; Brainerd Kellog, ed., MV (New York: 1895); Charles Porter and H.A. Clarke, eds., MV (New York: 1903), pp. XXVII f.; A.T. Cadoux, Shakespearean Selves. An Essay in Ethics (London: 1938), p. 55.
18 Lawrence Danson, The Harmonies of The Merchant of Venice (New Haven and London: 1978), pp. 126-69.
19 "An Apology for the Conduct and Character of Shylock," by T.O., in Essays by a Society of Gentlemen, at Exeter (London: 1796), pp. 552-73. Hole's piece was roundly condemned in The Monthly Review and The British Critic, but praised in The Universal Magazine.
20 Bernhard Ten Brink, Five Lectures on Shakespeare, (London: 1895), pp. 185-93. It suffices to mention that in 1906 Walter Raleigh, the editor of the Arden Shakespeare, also counted Shylock a tragic figure and condemned the last act for its heartless frivolity. Later, John Shackford found the tragic element in Shylock's being treated "as a Jewish thing, outside the pale of humanity." He absolves Shakespeare on the supposition of ironic intent. ("The Bond of Kindness: Shylock's Humanity." The University of Kansas City Review, (1954), pp. 85-91. See also Horace B. Bridges' Our Fellow Shakespeare (Chicago: 1925), pp. 75-99.
21 Another clue is Gratiano's line, "Now, by my Lord, a gentile and no Jew." (I suggest instead that he means only that since Jessica is gulling a Jew, she is a Gentile—which still leaves the question of intent open.) Goddard proposes a Shylock at war with his own "repressed virtues." (H.C. Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare (Chicago: 1951), pp. 81-116.
22 C.W. Thomas, "Shakespeare and Shylock," Shakespeariana, July 1890, pp. 139-50.
23 T.M. Parrot, ed., Twenty-three plays and the Sonnets (New York: 1949), pp. 134-44.
24 Francis Gentleman, The Dramatic Censor or Critical Companion (1770) in J. Wilders, The MV, A Casebook (London: 1969), pp. 23-26.
25 Herman Ulrici, Shakespeare's Dramatic Art (1839), in ibid., pp. 30-33.
26 E.D. Pettet, "The MV and the Problem of Usury" ibid., pp. 105-112. The same is true of Sir Edmund Chamber's introduction to Red Letter Shakes peare (1925), rpt. in Shakespeare: A Survey (1948), pp. 112-115.
27 J.R. Brown, ed., MV (London and Cambridge, Mass 1955), p. XXXIX.
28 Anne Barton, The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston: 1974), pp. 251-52. Barton, describing the "virtues" as Christian, does not say forthrightly that the vices are Jewish; perhaps she does not mean that.
29 A.W. Schlegel, Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature (1808), in Augustus Ralli, A History of Shakespearean Criticism (London: 1895), I, p. 119.
30 New Exegesis of Shakespeare (Edinburgh: 1859), pp. 229-49. An anony mous review can be found in The North British Review, 31 (1859), pp. 253-63.
31 Rev. H.N. Hudson, ed., MV (Boston: 1879), pp. 60-75.
32 Stopford Brooke, On Ten Plays of Shakespeare (London: 1905), pp. 136-40.
33 Morton Luce, A Handbook to the Works of William Shakespeare (Lon don : 1906), p. 204.
34 L.L. Schücking, Character Problems in Shakespeare's Plays (London: 1919; rpt New York, 1948), pp. 88-94.
35 Cumberland Clark, Shakespeare and National Character (London: 1932), p. 202. See also: M.C. Bradbrook, Shakespeare and Elizabethan Poetry, (London: 1951) in Wilders, op. cit., pp. 132-41.
36 Harley Granville-Barker, Prefaces to Shakespeare Second Series (London: 1935), pp. 92-106.
37 E.E. Stoll, "Shylock," JEGP, 10 (1911), pp. 236-79; rpt. in his Shakespeare Studies (New York: 1927), pp. 237-240. Stoll was a professor of English literature at Western Reserve University.
38 The emphasis on race is interesting, at a time when the doctrines of Gobineau, Drumont and H.S. Chamberlain were being spread.
39 E.E. Stoll, "Shakespeare's Jew," University of Toronto Quarterly 8 (1939), pp. 139-54.
40 "Shakespeare's Shylock" SQ, 15 (1964), pp. 193-99.
41 Shylock's great speech was intended as "a specious piece of rationalizing… the most obtrusive example in the play of the use of religion as a cloak for villainy."
42 An interesting subject, but one we cannot treat here, is Shylock's fortunes in France. Ignored until the second half of the nineteenth-century, he was ardently displayed as the archetypal Jew as anti-Semitism rose in sweeping waves until it climaxed in the Dreyfus Affair, when mobs clamored in the streets for the blood of Jews. Victor Hugo—to cite just one example—wrote: "Shylock est la juiverie… toute sa nation… et c'est parce qu'il résume toute une race, telle que l'oppression l'a fait, que Shvlock est grand." Oeuvres complètes (Paris: 1937), "Ph sophie," II, p. 124. Pierre Messiaen, in his introduction to his new translation of the play, reveals himself as Stoll's twin: Shakespeare, because of his recognition of Shylock as the summary of his race and the opprobrium he has heaped on him, is a good Christian. Shakespeare, Les Comédies (Paris: 1961), pp. 625-31.
43 A.A. Smirnov, Shakespeare, A Marxist Interpretation (New York: 1936), pp. 29-35.
44 Two of these are Arthur Sewell's Character and Society in Shakespeare (Oxford: 1951) and C.L. Barber's Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (1959) in Wil ders, op. cit., pp. 176-92.
45 Nevill Coghill, "The Theme of The Merchant of Venice," in Shakespeare Criticism 1935-1960 (London: 1963), Frank Kermode, "Some Themes in the Merchant of Venice." Both are in Twentieth Century Interpretations of the Merchant of Venice (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: 1970), pp. 108-113, 97-100.
46 Graham Midgeley, "The Merchant of Venice: A Reconsideration", Essays in Criticism, 10 (1960), pp. 119-33.
47 A.D. Moody, "An Ironic Comedy," in Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice (London: 1964), rpt. in Barnet, op. cit., pp. 100-108. Whether we classify Moody in the third or fifth order of attitudes is a matter of choice.
48 It will perhaps not be useless to recall the definition of ethos: "The dispositions, character or attitude peculiar to a specific people, culture or group that distinguishes it from other peoples or groups; fundamental values or spirit; mores." (American Heritage Dictionary.)
49 The history of Jewish criticism of The Merchant of Venice would make an interesting psychological study, but is not part of this paper. Such writings are consequently excluded from this treatment. This may be the place to repeat D.L. Hobman's remark: "A recent inquiry among elementary school children revealed that Shylock still represents their first immediate reaction to any mention of the word Jew… Nevertheless, to Jewish readers, Shylock, with his un-Jewish lack of response to the appeal of human suffering, remains unrecog nizable as one of themselves." "The Jew in Gentile Fiction," The Contemporary Review, 97 (1940), p. 97.
50 Roland M. Frye, Shakespeare and Christian Doctrine (Princeton: 1963), p. 208.
51 Exposition of the Hebraic ethos can be found in the following: George F. Moore, Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era (Cambridge, Mass.: 1927); Claude Montefiore and Herbert Loewe, A Rabbinic Anthology (London: 1938, rpt. Meridian Books, 1963); M.R. Konvitz, Judaism and Human Rights: (New York: 1972). Here it is sufficient to realize that we are dealing with a legend that is fictitious and malevolent; that this legend has been instrumental in founding the traditional image of the Jew, embodied in The Merchant of Venice, the image which to Christians has often justified their conduct.
52 It is worth noting that for Henry Adams, for Drumont, Daudet, Maur ras—the list is long—the Jew is the "poisoner" (Adams' word), endowed with intellectual talents and arrogance, therefore the more dangerous.
53 It was found among ancient notes from college years.
54 Roland M. Frye, op. cit., p. 210.
55 C.L. Barber, op. cit., pp. 188-89. L. Danson renews and develops further the same ideas (loc. cit.).
56 The Idea of Revenge in Shakespeare (Calcutta: 1969), p. 255.
57 Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective. The Development of Shakespecrean Comedy and Romance (New York and London: 1965), p. 104.
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