Conversations with Shylock: The Merchant of Venice, Authorship Trouble, and Interpretive Instability in the Period of Early Print

An author who brought a new work to a publisher would be paid for the text . . . but this payment secured outright ownership of the text. . . . Having once received the initial payment the author then ceased to have any further interest (in the legal sense) in the text.¹

From Authors and Printers to Fathers, Readers, and Judges

Recently Kenneth Gross informed us that Shylock is Shakespeare.² Gross’s book is more suggestive than definitive, but what Gross envisions for the play is, in a certain register, entirely sensible. This is to say, while an intuitive way of imagining the text is to see Shylock as the alien, unknowable, and demonized other to the normalized Christian community, the sight lines in the play are likely much more complicated. It is not self-evident that ideological circumstances would lead Shakespeare and his audiences to see themselves as being in a sympathetic position with Italian-Catholic aristocrats and plutocrats. As Stephen Orgel has suggested, Shylock might just be English.³ Even if he is not, more recent scholarship has argued that we would be wise not to reify an essentialist othering of Judaism in the text, especially as it relates to any apparent politics or interpretive perspectives for the play.⁴ All of this is to say, Shylock is less an absolute alien than a kind of doppelganger. He may not be a consciously mechanical double for Shakespeare (he may be more of an anxious, if unconscious, manifestation of “Shakespeare’s self-concealing counter-authorship”),⁵ but as I will suggest below, Shylock is a kind of double for anyone navigating through the complex relationships involved in the late Elizabethan control and interpretation of one’s own writing.

With Shylock as a type of double in mind, consider our recent scholarly discussion on the history of early print: If Adrian Johns’s The Nature of The Book crystalized a certain direction in scholarship, it would be that print in the sixteenth and into the seventeenth century is not accurately described by Elizabeth Eisenstein’s narrative of stability, consistency, and veracity.⁶ Instead, the story of print is a story of instability and anxiety about the credibility of texts as well as anxiety about shifting landscapes with respect to authority, control, and piracy. And indeed, as the tension between credit and piracy becomes a central element of the story of early print, it further complicates ideas about the habits of readers and the emergence of authorial control; it also suggests deeply tricky relationships between authorship, legality, and texuality, as well as between writers, printers, and the Stationers’ Hall.

It is out of this universe that Douglas A. Brooks, in his essay “Inky Kin, Reading in the Age of Gutenberg Paternity,” argues for an understanding of the relationship between playwrights and print as one infused with a language of sexual and reproductive potency.⁷ Brooks observes that the “frequency of conceptual and/or lexical conflations of parenting and printing—and there are dozens of them—in Shakespeare’s work suggests just how readily metaphors of textual reproduction could be appropriated for the discourse of human reproduction.”⁸ At this point in the argument Brooks is working toward a reading of the paratexual apparatus to Corayate’s Crudities as well as rehearsing Ben Jonson’s unique—maybe strongly paternal—role in the construction of authorship. These claims are positioned against Shakespeare’s notably more ambiguous paternalism. All of this enables Brooks’s reading of Richard Brome’s 1638 play, The Antipodes. Brooks goes on to argue that “authorship, the form of fetishism that so successfully facilitates the commodification of printed books, is so often represented within proto-biologistic narratives of reproduction, . . . partly because such narratives of fathers and children, of blood and kinsmen, constitute the epistemological foundations of ancestor worship and life after death.”⁹ Yet this author-father that seems clear in Brome and struggled for in Jonson is largely at the lexical, latent, and unconscious level in Shakespeare. Brooks concludes that “the conceptual, semantic, and metaphorical ties that bind printing...