Was Shylock Jewish?

Abstract

EVEN TO ASK WHETHER SHYLOCK WAS JEWISH may seem perverse. After all, The Merchant of Venice was first registered in the Stationers’ Register 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 sometimes 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 significance of his Jewishness has been the key hermeneutic question for readings of the play. 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 consolidation can be traced to Henry Irving’s influential nineteenth-century production 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

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