Jews, Spaniards, and Portingales: Ambiguous Identities of Portuguese Marranos in Elizabethan England

[Shakespeare] drew Shylock out of his own long pocket. . . . All events brought grist to his mill. Shylock chimes with the jewbaiting that followed the hanging and quartering of the queen's leech Lopez, his Jew's heart being plucked forth while the sheeny was yet alive.

—James Joyce, Ulysses

Could Elizabethan playgoers attend a performance of The Merchant of Venice (1596-1597) without recalling the bloody execution of the Queen's Jewish physician Roderigo Lopez? In 1594 Lopez, a Portuguese émigré, was indicted for conspiring with Spain to assassinate Elizabeth I, and after a tumultuous and prolonged trial he was publicly executed in the manner of traitors. In the wake of Lopez's death plays about Jews enjoyed a morbid popularity. Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta (1590) returned to the stage to profit from the anti-Semitism raised by the gruesome gallows scene, and two years after the event Shakespeare invented Shylock. The temporal proximity of the Tyburn spectacle to the writing of Shakespeare's play led Sidney Lee in 1880 to suggest that the Jewish doctor furnished the playwright with the prototype for Shylock, the assumption being that Lopez was the only contemporary, famous, and villainous Jew available to Shakespeare's literary imagination. ¹ Since the publication of Lee's Lopez/Shylock theory it has been virtually unthinkable to investigate what has come to be known as the Jewish question in early modern England without considering the historical and cultural importance of the Lopez controversy. To be true, the scandal is helpful for understanding some aspects of Elizabethan anti-Semitism. At the same time, however, Lee's argument lacks the strong textual evidence necessary to definitively map Lopez onto Shylock. ² Nevertheless, the specter of Lopez restlessly haunts nearly all modern editions of the play. The troubled legacy of Lee's topical approach is that subsequent criticism tends to foreground Lopez's religious affiliation at the expense of other constituent factors of his profile. ³ For example, what Joyce's speculative meditation on Shakespeare's creative process omits in the above quotation is that Lopez was not only a Jew, but a foreign Portuguese outsider and the central figure of a major Anglo-Spanish conspiracy to assassinate the Queen.

One finds no mention of Lopez's Jewish affiliations in the official state account of the plot recorded by Lord Burghley in A True Report of Sundry Horrible Conspiracies. Burghley classifies him simply as a "Portingale." ⁴ Clearly, for a Protestant government intent on drumming up anti-Spanish propaganda it was more advantageous to play up the political angle rather than the Jewish one. This is evident in Burghley's inclusion in the very same tract of an account of the Yorke-Williams plot—a conspiracy to murder the Queen by Jesuits in league with Spain. Following Burghley's lead, I will be looking at early modern English Jewry from a political perspective by situating it within an Anglo-Spanish context fraught with national, economic, and racial antagonisms. In doing so I do not discount the effects that the trial and death of Lopez may have had upon the question of English Jewry; rather, I wish to show that one cannot pose the Jewish question in Renaissance England without posing the Spanish question as well. Moreover, my intention is not to ignore the work of scholars devoted to exploring early modern anti-Semitism, but to show that inquiries narrowly focused on theology run the risk of overlooking pertinent issues of race and nationality—categories that the early modern Jew in England both occupies and destabilizes. To broaden and reformulate my leading question: could Elizabethan playgoers regard Jewish characters on the late sixteenth-century stage without recalling the spectacular execution of the Queen's Portuguese physician Roderigo Lopez?

In his landmark essay "Elizabethans and Foreigners," G. K. Hunter upholds Lee's topical assertion with a theological interpretation. For Hunter, Lopez's religious...