‘Which is the Merchant
here, and which the Jew?’
Shylock’s ‘Otherness’ in The Merchant of
Venice
Mapping characters
Antonio
Arragon
Bassanio
Gratiano
Jessica
Launcelot Gobbo
Lorenzo
Morocco
Nerissa
Portia
Shylock
‘THEM’
‘US’
‘Hath not a Jew eyes?’

D. M. Cohen argues that the moment paints Shylock in
an unfavourable light:

‘His speech of wheedling self-exculpation is surely intended
to be regarded in the way that beleaguered tenants today
might regard the whine of their wealthy landlord: “Hath not a
landlord eyes? Hath not a landlord organs, dimensions,
senses, affections, passions?” Instead of eliciting sympathy
for an underdog, Shakespeare intended the speech to elicit
detestation for one in a privileged and powerful position who
knowingly and deliberately abases himself in a plea for
unmerited sympathy.’ (Cohen 1980: 60-1)
The question of Anti-Semitism

‘Is Shylock a money-grubbing usurer eager to take a
knife to Christians, or a Lear-like Jew, more sinned
against than sinning? How do we reconcile his forced
conversion – after he has been stripped of his wealth,
his work, and his daughter – with the play’s comic
closure?’ (Shapiro 2007)
Jewish stereotypes: The Bible


The story of Barabbas
‘When Pilate saw that he
could not prevail, but rather
that a tumult was beginning,
he took water and washed his
hands before the multitude,
saying, “I am innocent of the
blood of this just person. See
ye to it.” Then answered all
the people and said, “His
blood be on us, and on our
children!”’ Matthew 27: 24-5,
King James Bible, 1611
Barabbas as depicted in Mel Gibson’s The
Passion of the Christ (2004)
Jewish stereotypes: Usury


‘If thou lend money to any of my people that is poor by
thee, thou shalt not be to him as an usurer, neither shalt
thou lay upon him usury.’ Exodus 22: 25, King James
Bible, 1611
‘And the Lord spake unto Moses in mount Sinai, saying
… And if thy brother be waxen poor, and fallen in
decay with thee; then … take thou no usury of him …
but fear thy God; … thou shalt not give him thy money
upon usury, nor lend him thy victuals for increase.’
Leviticus 25: 35-37, King James Bible, 1611
Jewish stereotypes: Greed

‘Their breath stinks with lust for the
Gentiles’ gold and silver; for no nation
under the sun is greedier than they were,
still are, and always will be, as is evident
from their accursed usury. … They live
among us, enjoy our shield and
protection, they use our country and our
highways, our markets and streets.
Meanwhile our princes and rulers… let
the Jews, by means of their usury, skin
and fleece them and their subjects and
make them beggars with their own
money.’

Martin Luther, Von den Juden und Ihre Lügen
(About the Jews and Their Lies),1543
Jewish stereotypes: Murder





Saint William of Norwich,
1144
Saint Harold of Gloucester,
1168
Saint Robert of Bury, 1181
Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln,
1255
Geoffrey Chaucer’s
‘Prioress’s Tale’
Massacre in York, 1190



York had a small but significant Jewish community.
Locals in York grew resentful of their wealth.
Following the coronation of Richard I in 1189, a spate of violence
against Jews swept across England based on a false rumour that
the King had authorised the violence.
Edict of Expulsion, 1290




English Jews had to
wear identifying yellow
badges from 1218
All Jews were ordered
to leave England by
Edward I in 1290
Most settled in Spain,
Germany, Poland and
Itlay (Venice, of course,
had its own Jewish
Ghetto)
The edict was not
overturned until 1656
The Jew of Malta, c. 1590
BARABAS. First, be thou void of these affections:
Compassion, love, vain hope, and heartless fear.
Be moved at nothing; see thou pity none,
But to thyself smile when the Christians moan. …
As for myself, I walk abroad a-nights
And kill sick people groaning under walls;
Sometimes I go about and poison wells…
Roderigo Lopez

A Portuguese Jew, physician to Elizabeth I, confessed in 1594
that ‘upon a contract for 50000 ducats he had promised to
poison the Queen’:





‘At the Bar, Lopez spake not much, but cried out … that he intended no
hurt against the Queen, … and that he had no other meaning but to
deceive the Spaniard and wipe him of his money.’
‘They were all of them condemned, and after three months put to death
at Tyburn, Lopez affirming that he had loved the Queen as he loved Jesus
Christ, which from a man of the Jewish profession was heard not without
laughter.’
(William Camden, The Historie of the Life and Reigne of that Famous Princesse,
Elizabeth, 1629. )
Described by his prosecutors as a “vile Jew”
Hanged, drawn and quartered on 7 June 1594
Shylock as Jewish ‘Other’

Mary Metzger describes Shylock’s first appearance as
‘the incarnation of the inherently evil Jew of medieval
and early modern Christian legend’: scheming, greedy,
satanic, and bloodthirsty (1998: 56).
SHYLOCK. [Aside] How like a fawning publican he looks!
I hate him for he is a Christian,
But more for that in low simplicity
He lends out money gratis and brings down
The rate of usance here with us in Venice.
Shylock as Jewish ‘Other’
SALANIO. I never heard a passion so confused,
So strange, outrageous, and so variable,
As the dog Jew did utter in the streets:
‘My daughter! O my ducats! O my daughter!’
LANCELOT GOBBO. Certainly the Jew is the very
devil incarnal…
The trial scene


‘…arguably the darkest moment in
Shakespearean comedy’ (Berry 2002: 126).
The Duke calls Shylock ‘an inhuman wretch /
Uncapable of pity, void and empty / From any
dram of mercy.’
The trial scene

Berry on Shylock’s conversion:

‘Although some critics (mercifully few) argue that
from an Elizabethan perspective forced conversion
represents genuine mercy, the moment seems
intended to shock. By losing his status as “other,”
Shylock loses his sense of self. … Acceptance of the
“other” seems in this case more malicious than
ostracism.’ (2002: 126)
Disrupting Shylock’s ‘Otherness’


Portia’s question – ‘Which is the merchant here, and which the
Jew?’ – immediately disrupts any stable sense of ‘self’ and ‘other’.
Shylock makes a valid point about the Christian characters’
hypocrisy:
SHYLOCK. You have among you many a purchased slave,
Which, like your asses and your dogs and mules,
You use in abject and in slavish parts,
Because you bought them: shall I say to you,
Let them be free, marry them to your heirs?
Why sweat they under burthens? Let their beds
Be made as soft as yours and let their palates
Be season’d with such viands? You will answer
‘The slaves are ours’: so do I answer you.
Disrupting Shylock’s ‘Otherness’

‘Shylock’s vengefulness marks him as a Jew, an “other” to the
Christians, who espouse the doctrine of mercy that Portia
enunciates in the trial scene. Yet as the scene unfolds, Shylock’s
vengefulness comes to seem almost indistinguishable from a
Christian charity that outwits and breaks him.’ (Berry 2002: 131)
PORTIA. Down therefore, and beg mercy of the duke.

‘Portia’s eloquent and oft-quoted speech on the “quality of
mercy” which, in the context of the trial scene… urges on
Shylock a generosity of behaviour that Portia herself will
ultimately fail to show toward him.’ (Garber 2004: 283)
Disrupting Shylock’s ‘Otherness’

‘…the certainty of the moral superiority of the Christian / Catholic over the
Jew is eroded … by Shylock’s scathing account of his customary treatment by
Antonio’ (O’Rourke 2003: 377):
SHYLOCK. Signior Antonio, many a time and oft
In the Rialto you have rated me
About my moneys and my usances: […]
You call me misbeliever, cut-throat dog,
And spit upon my Jewish gaberdine,
And all for use of that which is mine own.
[…]
ANTONIO. I am as like to call thee so again,
To spit on thee again, to spurn thee too.

As Shylock says himself: ‘The villainy you teach me, I will execute.’
Other ‘Others’?



‘Given the nature of the dominant ideology and social ethos
of Elizabethan England, one is not surprised to find in
Shakespeare’s comedies biases in favour of aristocratic, male,
white, English, heterosexual Christians. In Elizabethan
culture, such categories define a normative “self”; those who
fall outside them are considered “other”.’ (Berry 2002: 124)
By Berry’s logic, nearly all the characters in The Merchant
of Venice are ‘othered’ in some way.
The whole play becomes about a system in which every
character is included somehow, but excluded in another
way.
Other ‘Others’: Class


Antonio as merchant vs. Bassanio as aristocrat
Class ‘bonds’:
Gratiano to Bassanio
 Nerissa to Portia
 Launcelot Gobbo and Old Gobbo to Shylock

Other ‘Others’: Race
MOROCCO. Mislike me not for my complexion,
The shadow’d livery of the burnish’d sun,
To whom I am a neighbour and near bred.
Bring me the fairest creature northward born,
Where Phoebus’ fire scarce thaws the icicles,
And let us make incision for your love,
To prove whose blood is reddest, his or mine.
PORTIA. A gentle riddance. Draw the curtains, go.
Let all of his complexion choose me so.
Other ‘Others’: Gender
PORTIA. …this reasoning is not in the fashion to choose
me a husband. O me, the word ‘choose!’ I may neither
choose whom I would nor refuse whom I dislike; so is
the will of a living daughter curbed by the will of a dead
father.
PORTIA. Myself and what is mine to you and yours
Is now converted: but now I was the lord
Of this fair mansion, master of my servants,
Queen o’er myself: and even now, but now,
This house, these servants and this same myself
Are yours, my lord: I give them with this ring.
Other ‘Others’: Gender
BASSANIO. Sweet doctor, you shall be my bed-fellow:
When I am absent, then lie with my wife.


All three central female characters
in the play blur gender lines by
cross-dressing at some point.
Berry argues that a similar
disruption of categories of ‘self’
and ‘other’ is at work:

‘Each of these characters is a shapeshifter, capable of calling into
question the very nature of identity
itself.’ (2002: 129)
Other ‘Others’: Race, Class, Gender
and Religion
JESSICA. Nay, you need not fear us, Lorenzo: Launcelot and I
are out. He tells me flatly, there is no mercy for me in heaven,
because I am a Jew’s daughter: and he says, you are no good
member of the commonwealth, for in converting Jews to
Christians, you raise the price of pork.
LORENZO. I shall answer that better to the commonwealth
than you can the getting up of the negro’s belly: the Moor is
with child by you, Launcelot.
LAUNCELOT. It is much that the Moor should be more than
reason: but if she be less than an honest woman, she is
indeed more than I took her for.
Other ‘Others’: Homosexuality
SALARINO. Why, then you are in love.
ANTONIO. Fie, fie!
ANTONIO. My purse, my person, my extremest means,
Lie all unlock’d to your occasions.
SALARINO. And even there, his eye being big with tears,
Turning his face, he put his hand behind him,
And with affection wondrous sensible
He wrung Bassanio’s hand; and so they parted.
SALANIO. I think he only loves the world for him.
Other ‘Others’: Homosexuality
ANTONIO. Commend me to your honourable wife,
Tell her the process of Antonio’s end,
Say how I lov’d you, speak me fair in death:
And when the tale is told, bid her be judge
Whether Bassanio had not once a love.

Antonio promises to pass Shylock’s wealth to Jessica
and Lorenzo, not to his own heirs.

‘If Antonio is excluded from the good life at the end of the
Merchant, so the gay man is excluded from the play’s address.
… It is the Shakespearean text that is reconfirming the
marginalization of an already marginalized group.’ (Sinfield
1996: 128)
Other ‘Others’: Homosexuality

‘Antonio hates Shylock not because he is a more
fervent Christian than others, but because he
recognizes his own alter ego in this despised Jew who,
because he is a heretic, can never belong to the state.
… He hates himself in Shylock: the homosexual self
that Antonio has come to identify symbolically as the
Jew.’ (Kleinberg 1985: 120)
Other ‘Others’ – a final observation

‘Not only were there no Jewish moneylenders in
London in 1594, but the hated foreign usurers in
London in the 1590s were mostly Italians’
(O’Rourke 2003: 376).
References




Berry, Edward (2002) ‘Laughing at “Others”’, in
Leggatt, A. [ed.] The Cambridge Companion to
Shakespearean Comedy, Cambridge: C.U.P., 123-38.
Cohen, D. M. (1980) ‘The Jew and Shylock’, Shakespeare
Quarterly, 31: 1, 53-63.
Garber, Marjorie (2004) Shakespeare After All, New
York: Pantheon Books.
Kleinberg, Seymour (1985) ‘The Merchant of Venice: The
Homosexual as Anti-Semite in Nascent Capitalism’ in
Kellog, S. [ed.] Literary Visions of Homosexuality, New
York: The Haworth Press.
References




Metzger, Mary Janell (1998) ‘“Now by My Hood, a
Gentle and No Jew”: Jessica, The Merchant of Venice, and
the Discourse of Early Modern English Identity’,
PMLA, 113: 1, 52-63.
O’Rourke, James (2003) ‘Racism and Homophobia in
The Merchant of Venice’, ELH, 70: 2, 375-397.
Shapiro, James (2007) ‘The Villainy You Teach Me’,
Financial Times, January 12.
Sinfield, Alan (1996) ‘How to Read The Merchant of
Venice without being Heterosexist’, in Terence Hawkes
[ed.] Alternative Shakespeares 2, London: Routledge, 12239.