Was Shylock Jewish?

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 Victorian racial "science." This essay takes a series of turns. First, I describe Irving's production and its immediate reception. Then, I show how late nineteenth-century scholarship laid the foundation stones of the idea that this sympathetic Shylock was unhistorical. The evidence for Shylock's early modern Jewishness was first brought forward in the controversy surrounding Irving's production. I revisit that evidence—that Shylock is a negative dramatic character type of the "Jew," that he "looked Jewish" on the Elizabethan stage, that he recalled anti-Semitic prejudice crystallized by the Lopez affair, and that he is given linguistic and other cultural habits appropriate and realistic for a Jew— and find that it has very little archival or historical basis. Despite this, many of its assumptions have, as I demonstrate, become axiomatic in modern scholarship, particularly in the editorial apparatus of standard editions of the play. Shylock's strongly Jewish identity has actually served as a post hoc supplement to Shakespeare's play rather than an a priori essence; further, it is a supplement that itself can be historicized. I argue that the original legibility and implication of Shylock's Jewishness have been overstated, and provide an alternative historical reading in which that Jewishness is contingent rather than essential—the Jew as semantic, rather than as Semitic, property. It is the aim of this essay to identify the source of certain assumptions about the Elizabethan Shylock and thereby to draw out what is at stake in our iterative cultural and critical work of racial constitution.

Henry Irving's Merchant of Venice, 1879

If, as Linda Rozmovits has written, The Merchant of Venice "might well be described as a late Victorian popular obsession," then Henry Irving's production of the play which opened at the Lyceum Theatre in November 1879 must stand as its epicenter.⁴ The production had 250 performances in its first year and hundreds more on tour in England and America over the next two decades.⁵ It has been estimated that a third of a million spectators saw the production in the 1879-80 season. Irving's characterization of Shylock "'as the type of a persecuted race'" with the interpolated anguish of his return to his house to find Jessica gone was remarkable for its pathos and much repeated by later productions.⁶ Irving himself reported that he was moved to play Shylock by having observed a dignified "Levantine Jew" while sailing in the Mediterranean. He wrote to...