Shylock Is Shakespeare (review)

Think of it: an author (Shakespeare) and his character (Shylock) share problematic traits. Professionally, both trade in suspect currencies (the author's words, the moneylender's gold) capable of being valued, devalued, transformed, and counterfeited. Socially, both are caught between worlds as deviants and outsiders, not quite reputable denizens of a borderland (the actor-author's theater, the usurer's back alley) where conventional mores are held in suspension and can be controversialized. Morally, both are capable of offending and of being offended with their pitiless gaze upon the commerce of the world, their awful pragmatism with respect to human conduct, and their horrible rejection by those they serve (the dramatist's audience, the broker's clients). Yet in a startling way, both are doubles of those they serve — audiences and clients — who resist identifying with their own actions as represented on the stage (in the case of Shakespeare) and with their bondage to law and money (in the case of Shylock). In a brilliant Joycean riff on the linguistic pull of their names, each beginning with sh and shocked by a k (14–15), Kenneth Gross launches his investigation into homologies between author and character that disturb our reception of the play, of its historical roots, and of the cultural assumptions that haunt its afterlife. It is one of the very few books that have altered my view of Shakespeare, of his radical dramaturgy, and of the environment that begot both.

Of the several forks that Gross's argument takes — the book unfolds in fourteen chapters, each pursuing its own route — two captured my particular attention and seemed to order its dominant claims. First, Gross conceives of Shylock as "a threshold character," one that marks "something of a discovery for Shakespeare that will become the fuel of his later plays" (103). Here we find the playwright working with the "opaque uncertainty" and "riddling representation" that he would develop in his later tragedies, particularly in the ethos of Hamlet, Othello, Lear, and Macbeth (147). Specifically, it concerns a character who fashions "his status as an alien or monster into a performance he can turn against his persecutors" (153). Second, following from this line of reasoning, Gross argues that Shylock adumbrates a "poetics of repugnancy" (149), an esthéthique du mal that announces Shakespeare's distinctive contribution to the European and North American canon of literature. This poetics evinces both formal properties that compel our pleasure and amazement and historical determinations that gave rise to such an aesthetic in a cultural context. Specifically — and here I am extrapolating on the basis of my own interests in intellectual history — it arises in the transition from a late medieval society to an early modern secular one.

One formal sign of Shylock's repugnance is the tic of compulsive repetition that distinguishes his patterns of speech throughout the play, notably in his most famous monologue: "Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands? . . . If you prick us, do we not bleed? . . . And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?" (3.1.54–62). As Gross's fine-grained textual analysis shows, these repetitions are by turns monstrous and comic. They are monstrous because they signal Shylock's unrelenting attachment to his legal bond and because they reinforce this attachment at a time when the medieval idea of bond as expressing "communal relationships" was giving way to "the arbitrariness and hyperrationalism of modern contract law" (61). Shylock embarks upon an exploration of social relationships in a new commercial order, releasing the "furies of the law" even as he becomes their victim (65). His horrendous resentment becomes "a guarantor of our freedom of will and of our embeddedness in a structure of human relations," just as it affronts the quality of mercy and our communal dependences (71). Dramatically, Gross pushes his argument further. Shylock's monstrosity manifests the "paradoxical generosity" of a clown, and it gathers comic force as it displays Shylock's "relentless embrace of his own failure and...