“The most famous Jew outside the Old Testament”: Recontextualizing Shakespeare in Clive Sinclair’s Shylock Must Die

Abstract

The posthumously published short story collection Shylock Must Die (2018) by the British Jewish writer Clive Sinclair works with Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice in a variety of creative ways. The short stories borrow from The Merchant of Venice especially the theme of antisemitism and Shylock as the main Jewish character but are usually set in the 20th or 21st century rather than in the Renaissance. Some stories react to notable productions of the play across the globe, e.g. in Stockholm in 1944, London in 2012 or in Venice in 2016, the year of the quincentennial commemorations of the foundation of the Venetian ghetto. The stories also include tragicomic elements as typical features of Jewish literature.