Which Is the ‘Jew / That Shakespeare Drew’? Shylock’s Afterlife in Mere Reading and Maverick Stagings

Abstract

ABSTRACT If, at first, Shylock’s Jewishness in The Merchant of Venice seems to brand him as a villain, his character is more nuanced and unsettling than any cultural stereotype. Shylock cannot simply be contained as a grotesque comic demon of literary traditions. He is a complex character: villain and victim, comic and tragic, paradoxical, controversial, and problematic. He is not a historical Jew but the representation of one in a romantic comedy, from which he is eventually excluded. We focus here on scenes in which Shylock appears, moment by moment, word by word, tempering that slow motion approach of close reading, or what Paul de Man once lauded as ‘mere reading’, with synoptic sallies into maverick stagings: two transnational productions which circulated as Spanish/Germanic and French commodities in this century. To what extent are such interpretations of Shylock diachronic projections – as Alexander Pope purportedly put it – of ‘the Jew / That Shakespeare drew’?