Shakespeare's Shylock

Abstract

HE common assumption that Shakespeare's Shylock was created to compete with Marlowe's play, The Jew of Malta, in pandering to a wave of anti-Semitism greeting the arraignment and execution for treason in 1594 of Elizabeth's Jewish physician, Roderigo Lopez, becomes untenable upon examination. The evidence seems to indicate that through Shylock Shakespeare is really not satirizing Jews as such but is attempting to depict a usurer, by vocation a villain, who hypocritically conceals his evil designs behind the mask of a religion he himself does not believe in. Prejudice against Jews as we know it today is not at all an issue in The Merchant of Venice. Indeed, if there really was a public upsurge of anti-Semitism in England in 1594-and the only evidence seems to be the revival of Marlowe's play and the composition, perhaps two years later, of Shakespeare's-it could hardly have been directed against overt Jews living in the community at the time, for despite the assertions of Sidney Lee,' Lucien Wolf,2 Michel Poirier,3 and John Bakeless4 to the contrary, there had been no such beings residing in England since the expulsion under Edward I. All four writers are actually referring, as Wolf inadvertently admits, to the New Christians, some of whom possibly were Marranos (or secret Jews), who were the descendants of the fifteenth-century converts of Portugal and who settled in England without opposition about 1540. That Lopez himself was a professed Christian, though born a Portuguese Jew, is attested to by the contemporary authority of one of his most outspoken enemies, Sir Francis Bacon.5 And according to the exhaustive researches of J. L. Cardozo,6 there is no evidence whatever of a single practicing Jew living in England from the expulsion in 1290 to the readmission of the Jews by Cromwell in i655. The enactments against heresy, applicable, of course, to unbelieving Jews as well as to other heretics, remained in full vigor until i65o. Jews in England are not mentioned by the Elizabethan voyagers who make numerous observations concerning foreign Jews abroad, and in all Elizabethan drama there is not one instance of an English Jew.