Shylock

...The most famous Jewish character on the English stage prior to Merchant had been Barabas in Marlowe's Jew of Malta...

...The novel contains a memorable diatribe against Shylock—put into the mouth of one David Supposnik, an antiquarian bookseller in Tel Aviv and possible member of the Israeli secret police...

...The Nazis did not need but were not reluctant to deploy the Shylock mythology...

...The German poet Heinrich Heine, ambivalent about his own Jewishness, wrote a memorable fantasy in which he goes searching for, finds, and accepts Shylock in a Venetian synagogue on Yom Kippur...

...Portia has to urge upon him "the quality of mercy...

...S hylock was a usurer...

...The Shylock was David Suchet, identified by Gross as "Jewish-born" and best known to American audiences as Hercule Poirot on PBS...

...The profound humanity of these words has altered—or at least complicated—the stereotype forever...

...The whole production was a sensation, despite snide reservations from some critics like Henry James...

...But the next significant dramatic incarnation of the character was that of Henry Irving, who first played him on November 1, 1879...

...It is a fascinating piece of research that, by following one thread, succeeds in illuminating the whole tapestry of theater history...

...Looking at Marx's overall treatment of Judaism, John Gross sees to the heart of his "arrogance," "brutal contempt," and "determination to put human beings through a metaphysical mincing machine...

...Of the play as a whole, he concludes that "it is still a masterpiece, but there is a permanent chill in the air...

...From Hazlitt on, views of Shylock might be said to be milestones in the moral growth—or reversion—of civilization...

...A fter the war and the Holocaust, Merchant has continued to hold world stages...

...We meet Leone da Modena, a learned Rabbi, poet, and director of a musical academy (Shylock is presented as anti-music...

...And Irving's Portia, the magnificent Ellen Terry, was an exciting match for his Shylock...

...Merchant itself was frequently and grotesquely staged in the Third Reich, most notoriously in the 1943 production starring Werner Krauss...

...Hazlitt himself, however, was a bold nineteenth-century liberal and was to become the first great literary re-interpreter and defender of Shylock as a noble victim of small-minded prejudice...

...You can't help wishing that Shakespeare had been able to read it," dryly comments Gross...

...So it amounts to much more than an academic survey when John Gross, in Shylock: A Legend and Its Legacy, maps the theatrical, cultural, historical, and moral vibrations of Shylock over the more than 400 years since his appearance in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice...

...A frequent use of Shylock in the last century and a half has been by the anti-Semitic left as a symbol of capitalist greed...

...I am a Jew," he says...

...As Stephen Dedalus cynically puts it in Ulysses, "He [Shakespeare] drew Shylock out of his own long pocket...

...Barabas was a Machiavellian monster who goes about cackling and poisoning wells (Barabas is rather a precursor of Shakespeare's Richard III than of Shylock...

...Kean, it is clear, still saw Shylock as a villain, though one with gleams of dignity...

...But, of course, Shylock becomes in the course of the play much more than the Jewish usurer of tradition...

...Shylock echoes on- and offstage through almost all the European cultures...

...In a way, Gross's book is like the many illustrated histories of productions of Hamlet or The Tempest that are regularly published, but there is a special historical—a metatheatricalimport in how Shylock has been acted on the stage of the world...

...The brilliantly melodramatic actor invented, to clinch audience sympathies, a scene where Shylock, solitary and tired, returns at night over a bridge to his home, where he expects to be welcomed by the daughter who has, we know, absconded with his jewels and money to marry a gentile...

...But a one-sided Shylock pops up in Philip Roth's provocatively titled Operation Shylock (which appeared too late for Gross to take account of...

...There were seven silent movie versions, but none in the sound era, although Merchant does figure in Ernst Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be, a 1942 filmabout a troupe of Polish actors shortly before and during the Nazi occupation...

...At least on London stages, Shylocks in the Irving mold prevailed through the 1920s...

...Modena's colorful and very unidealizing autobiography surfaced only in the nineteenth century...

...The writer then, for the remaining two-thirds of the book, tracks Shylock on and off the boards down to our own day...

...Humanized, but not sanctified by a long shot, for the man is still eaten by resentment, rancor, and anger, and makes himself the life-denying enemy of romance and gentleness and mercy...

...There was a rich tradition of Merchant performances on German—and indeed on New York and London Yiddish—stages, although it was done much more rarely in France...

...As Gross puts it with electric precision: "At no point does anyone suggest that there might be a distinction between his [Shylock's] being a Jew and his being an obnoxious individual...

...One of the two reviewers who happened to be in the audience that night was Hazlitt, who wrote memorably of Kean's vitality and energy...

...Marx was a pioneer in this unsavory practice, as in so many others, frequently using "Shylock" as a term of abuse—speaking, for instance, in Das Kapital of British landowners as "aristocratic Shylocks...

...In it, Supposnik rails against that softening sentimentalization of Shylock, both on-and offstage, which Gross is so partial to...

...The author briskly punctures all the theological and economic cant about usury, which is merely a quaint and hypocritical name for the movement of money—the economic engine of early capitalism...

...But Gross resists this modish demonizing of the play's Christians just as he had resisted one-sided Shylocks...

...So The Merchant of Venice presents a tantalizing, anguishing case of a character half—but only half—emerging from the carapace of dehumanizing stereotype, like one of those late sculptures of Michelangelo still partially embedded in the rock...

...He reminds readers that "endless exhortations to deal mercifully can be found in the writings of the Rabbis" and that—supreme irony—the very source for Portia's remarks on mercy is the Jewish sage known as Ecclesiasticus...

...The troubling thing, writes Gross, is that the play treats these sins not as the defects of an individual but as properties of Shylock's Jewishness...

...Shylock was a popular role in thenineteenth century, essayed by William Macready, Junius Booth, and his son Edwin Booth, among others...

...These are Gielgud's own words, from his recent Acting Shakespeare—not cited by Gross...

...Although Shakespeare did enlarge the stereotype into a suffering human being, Shylock's negative characteristics predominate and are never distinguished by anyone in the play from his Jewishness as such...

...Certainly there was more Christian "usury" than there was Jewish...

...But behind all such tales was the medieval stereotype of the red-haired, "demonic, deicidal Jew" out for Christian blood...

...And then there came the genuinely demonic use to which the Nazis put the figure of Shylock...

...T he first Shylock about whose performance we really know anything was Edmund Kean, the flamboyant Romantic actor who debuted in the role on January 26, 1814...

...And Gross reminds us, even more drolly, that William Shakespeare was the son of a notorious moneylender and was likely one himself...

...The son of a maltjobber and moneylender he was himself a cornjobber and moneylender...

...The half-Jewish Proust endows his character Bloch with "the face of an old Shylock...

...He stands forth as a highly individualized and suffering and sympathetic (to a point) human being...

...In England, the text has been a football for egoist directors: the 1970 Jonathan Miller production was updated to Edwardian times, with Laurence Olivier playing Shylock as a sort of imperfectly assimilated banker...

...Gross punctures such caricatures by introducing us to contemporaneous "real Jews, living in the real world"—that is, the Venice of the late sixteenth century (there was virtually no Jewish life in Shakespeare's England...

...Shylock is also touchingly humanized in his love for his dead wife Leah and for his perfidious daughter Jessica...

...Irving himself called Shylock "the type of a persecuted race, almost the only gentleman in the play, and the most ill-used...

...Gross cites malign allusions to the Venetian in Trollope's The Prime Minister and in T. S. Eliot's "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar...

...G ross's final verdict on The Merchant of Venice and on the haunting, nagging figure of Shylock is not simple...

...Men of letters have not abandoned interest in Shylock...

...Things changed in the 1930s, when the most notable Shylock ostentatiously reverted to the old villainous stereotype: John Gielgud's 1937 Shylock was meant to be "a squalid little guttersnipe . . . a cringing Fagin-figure" deliberately breaking away from the "Irvingesque" tradition...

...At least these old humanist critics were intelligible, which much recent criticism is not—save in its general bent to debunk the play's Christians and to virtually ignore Shylock...

...These and similar moments in the play represent, in Gross's opinion, a greater achievement in the sixteenth century than a courageous gesture like George Eliot's Zionist novel Daniel Deronda was in 1876...

...Coleridge later wrote that watching this actor was "like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning...

...The most famous Shylock of that decade was George Arliss, whose interpretation, though perhaps drier and more restrained, was still Irvingesque...

...John Gross is justly hard on C. S. Lewis for using, in 1942, a phrase like "a wicked ogre of a Jew" but is perhaps too dismissive of C. L. Barber's reading of Shylock as a Lear in waiting...

...Irving played a melancholy, persecuted, noble Shylock, a man of immense pathos and (eventually ruined) grandeur...

...Gross, now theater critic of the London Sunday Telegraph, is the author of the superb Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters, which traced a phase of cultural history with perfect respect for the values of the mind and of the marketplace.' Merchant's plot derives from an obscure and brief Italian tale featuring, in skimpy detail, an unnamed Jewish moneylender who wants to exact a pound of flesh from a Christian creditor in Venice and is foiled in court by a clever lady in disguise...

...Hath not a Jew eyes...

...in Merchant, for instance, the high-minded high-seas merchant Antonio is far more a venture capitalist than Shylock, who is more candid, but also more conservative, about what he is doing...

...Gross distinguishes between such perverse and useless distortions and the old Irving mode of humanistic rethinking—a mode he finds alive in a 1980 staging by John Barton that carefully sought to present Shylock as an "outsider because he was a Jew...