The Merchant of Venice: What did Shakespeare Think of the Jews?

What did Shakespeare think about the Jews?

The question arises because of the radical ambiguity of a Shakespeare character — Shylock in the The Merchant of Venice (circa 1598). Because of him, the play has the rare distinction of having been banned both in Nazi Germany and in the new state of Israel. The Jews banned it because its cruel villain painfully recalled centuries of antisemitic caricature. The Nazis feared the drama could lead its audience into an emotional sympathy for Shylock. 

So what did Shakespeare think about Jews?

We don’t know. We never will. For Shakespeare didn’t leave a heritage of personal essays, diaries, a commonplace book, any record of his conversational opinions, a taped session with his therapist, what he thought and said over an ale or in pillow talk. All we have is his play. 

Of course, that is enough.  A Shakespeare play is a profound, circumspect  contemplation of humanity and language — far ahead of its time. That writer intuited what it took four centuries of savants to discover. Indeed, Harold Bloom contends that Shakespeare invented human nature — he replaced the traditional general types of dramatic characters with such complex personalities, exposing psychological depths through their words. His sense of the complexity of the human mind, its impulses and expression, was unprecedented in literature. Few match it still.

In fact, his play probably tells us more about Shakespeare’s view of the Jews than what he might have told us in person.  Ask a question and the answer may be tactfully modulated. Something is revealed, something hidden. But the storyteller’s mind unconsciously exposes itself through the details of his constructed narrative. Its patterns spring from the subconscious. They could tell the teller as well as us what he’s thinking. 

To read Shakespeare out of his play should give us a fair sense of what he thought about anything in or around it. That’s the function of critical analysis — to probe beyond the surface of a play’s (or poem’s or novel’s or film’s)  language and craft to work out what the author is saying through it. It’s because a work can reveal even more than even the author may be aware of that D.H.Lawrence enjoins us to “Trust the art, not the artist.”   

This exploration requires three steps. 

One: We recognize that every detail in the play is the author’s invention for the moment. Whether invented or recalled, nothing is there by accident. Nothing just happened. Two: In seeking the author’s mind we necessarily suppress our own reflex responses. Whether we like or dislike any element reveals us — not the author. So we set our “likes” aside in order to seek the ideas behind the material. 

Three: Meaning depends on context. Any element — whether of characterization, incident, dialogue — should not be read in isolation but in how it relates to other elements in the work. To discover the Shakespeare behind the details in the drama we have to define their interplay. It’s risky to identify him with any one character, incident or speech. The artist is revealed not in any one element but in their connections.  

And so — to The Merchant of Venice.       

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Start with the title. The real merchant of Venice here is Antonio, not Shylock. Antonio is the subject of focus. He is a highly respected merchant — and an honourable, generous, civilized Venetian merchant at that. His open-hearted treatment of his young friend Bassanio is a model of Platonic friendship. In the play’s main source — an Italian anthology, Il Pecorone — he’s Bassanio’s godfather not friend. Shakespeare’s inflection enhances the character’s selfless generosity. With him as the play’s central figure, the play becomes an anatomy of the model Christian Venetian.

Yet the play’s most gripping figure is in the supporting cast, not the lead. Throughout the play’s history the great actors have chosen to play not Antonio but Shylock. He appears in only five scenes but Shylock dominates the drama. He is just a — sneer — money-lender. But virtuous Antonio — perhaps because he is so virtuous —is far too bland to sweep our attention away from Shylock. Similarly, in the three Henry plays Prince Hal shrinks beside his flamboyant outlaw pal Falstaff. In both cases Shakespeare’s runaway imagination makes a supporting character far more engaging than the lead. In Shakespeare no effect is a mistake.   

Antonio’s virtue is slightly modified by the titular reference to Venice. In Shakespeare’s day Venice was a global trading centre. It connoted worldliness, social sophistication, material success — but shadowed by implications of the corruption and dishonesty of the “modern” world. 

This connects this Merchant with Othello. Shakespeare’s source for the latter opened with “There was a Moor in Venice.” Shakespeare was grabbed by that dramatic incongruity. An ostensible savage rises to heroism in the supposedly advanced white society, then is destroyed by its dishonesty and corruption. His very virtue proves his vulnerability. The downfall of the morally superior Othello makes his play a tragedy. The defeat of the cruel money-lender makes his play a comedy. But both plays question the supposed superiority of the Venice society over the alien it confronts. In both we’re provoked to sympathize with the outsider.

Given those connotations of “Venice” what would “Jew” have meant to Shakespeare? In personal terms, not much. It is unlikely that Shakespeare ever met a Jew. Having been banned from England during the reign of Edward I (13th Century), any remaining Jews in London were tolerated if they apparently conformed to Christianity. In Venice, of course, “ghetto” referred to the Jewish quarter as early as 1516. Absent personal experience, Shakespeare would only have had the sense of what the term evoked at the time — the idea of the Jew

That includes the virtual equation of Jews with money-lending — by historic happenstance. The Jews were forced into that profession by two factors. First, they were banned from the respectable professions. Second, the Christians’ prohibition to charge each other interest made the Jew’s moneylending a useful, indeed necessary, help to them. To the Christian charging interest was the sin of usury, so they could disdain the Jew for providing the services they needed from him. One reason Shylock hates Antonio is the merchant’s own tendency to lend “out money gratis, and brings down The rate of usuance here with us in Venice” (I,iii,39-40). Antonio’s virtue undermines Shylock’s business. 

Antonio’s “barren metal” suggests that making money from money is a sterile pursuit, unnatural. Shylock counters that by citing a Biblical example of pragmatic fertility, Jacob’s ingenious profiteering off his “parti-colored lambs.”  Shylock’s frequent Biblical language  establishes him as an Old Testament figure in the New Testament world. The clash between those two characters is the clash between those two worlds.

More importantly, Shylock’s hatred is a response to Antonio’s. Even as Antonio needs Shylock’s loan he still insults him. Shylock asks “Shall I bend low … Say this: ‘Fair sir, you spat on me on Wednesday last….another time, you call‘d me dog: and for these courtesies I’ll lend you thus much money?’” Antonio responds: “I am as like to call thee so again, To spit on thee again, to spurn thee too” (I,iii, 118-26). 

Yet they strike their deal. Shylock provides the 3,000 ducats — in the spirit of friendship, at no interest! But he sets the forfeit pledge of a pound of the confident Antonio’s flesh. At Shylock’s friendliness Antonio playfully salutes him at the end of Act I: “Hie thee gentle Jew, The Hebrew will turn Christian, he grows kind.” This amiable joke Antonio will make a cruel reality at the end when he indeed turns Shylock Christian. Then the Christians turn Hebraically harsh.

Shylock’s Old Testament allusions also confirm the Jews as the people of The Book and — as at beginning “the word.” As proponent of The Book Shylock is centrally defender of The Word. Here lies the crux of the play. Shylock is both ennobled and defeated by his insistence on the integrity of The Word. His virtue and his destruction both lie in his insistent adherence to an oath, specifically the promise he exacted from Antonio as a condition for the loan. Against the Jew’s rigid enforcement of an oath, Shakespeare plays the Venetians’ disrespect for their own promises, their word. On this theme the various subplots converge.      

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Context is especially important in regard to the two best-known speeches in the play. Both are the kind of standalone rhetorical arguments on a topic — any topic — in which Renaissance writers were fond of indulging their wit and knowledge. While both seem persuasive arguments on their respective subjects, when we view them in the larger context neither proves completely true to their speaker. Both speakers’ professed values are undermined by their behaviour. Quite apart from the moral point of each speech, the author reveals the danger in judging people by their surface presentation. People are not what they seem — especially in Shakespeare’s Venice.   

Shylock’s great turn, of course, is his argument for the humanity of the Jew. This emotional and logical response to the dehumanizing of a people, any people, is what scared the Nazis off the play, even though it conformed to their scurrilous stereotypy. Shylock addresses Antonio’s constant abuse and humiliation of him:

…and what’s his reason? I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? if you prick us do we not bleed? if you tickle us do we not laugh?

At this point Shylock shifts from identifying Jew with Christian in terms of humanity and establishes a new parallel: in villainy.

if you poison us do we not die?and if you wrong us shall we not revenge? if we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? revenge! If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? why revenge! The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction. (III,i, 52-66)

But Shylock’s actions may be at odds with his equation of Jew and Christian. He himself cites his people’s different diet, shunning pork. There’s a disjunction in the parallel of “warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer.” The characters’ commonality in blood is undermined by his eagerness to shed Antonio’s. As for his laughs from tickling: his daughter and his servant both flee his joyless house. The only joy we see in Shylock is at his enemy’s suffering. His espousal of Christian revenge leads only to his grief at losing everything — his daughter, ducats, and dignity. Shylock’s actions fall short of the case he makes for his humanity. Shakespeare doesn’t undermine the validity of Shylock’s argument — just the character’s pretence to living up to it. 

This is even more seriously the case with Portia’s famous rhetoric. Where Shylock is allowed but the vulgar tumble of prose, Portia gets the dignity of poetry:

The quality of mercy is not strain’d,

It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven

Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest,

It blesseth him that gives, and him that takes….

It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,

It is an attribute to God himself;

And earthly power doth then show likest God’s

When mercy seasons justice: therefore Jew,

Though justice be thy plea, consider this,

That in the course of justice, none of us

Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy,

And that same prayer, doth teach us all to render

The deeds of mercy. (IV,i, 180-98) 

In these two speeches clash the Old and New Testaments’ respective visions of God. The Old Testament Shylock expresses the wrath of a punishing Jehovah, Portia the Christian principle of forgiveness. Here the unforgiving Shylock is defeated by the supposedly merciful Portia, the harsh Old Testament supplanted by the forgiving New.

But is it? Portia’s judgment and Antonio’s sentence are problematic on several counts.

First, the judgment is based on a false pretence. Portia pretends to be what she is not, a qualified jurist or adjudicator. Second, she arrives determined to serve her fiance’s friend, not dispassionate justice. Then, having once promoted mercy she denies Shylock the opportunity to drop his claim. She then adopts his Old Testament harshness and literalism. He now must take the pledged pound of flesh — but precisely that and with nary a drop of blood. Then, for his mortal threat to a citizen she declares him an enemy to the state, subject to the Duke’s fine. The Duke takes half Shylock’s wealth and gives Antonio the other half. That Antonio with ostensible generosity lets Shylock use — but it will pass on to Lorenzo, the Christian who has stolen away Shylock’s daughter, Jessica. 

Climactically, Antonio compels Shylock to convert to Christianity. That twist would have delighted the Elizabethan audience. But in our quiet study that should give us pause. In addition to violating Portia’s exaltation of mercy, the forced conversion dooms Shylock’s soul as well as his earthly body. Having lost everything in his life he is now robbed of his afterlife. In Antonio’s final demand Portia’s justice curdles into vengefulness. Their quality of mercy proves not strained but lumpy. 

In reverting to Old Testament harshness Portia and Antonio turn Jew — in effect, invalidating their assumption of moral progress and superiority. This is why identifying the titular merchant, the Venetian Christian, is important. Antonio maintains his Christian virtue so long as he stands as solid behind his oath as Shylock does — especially when he bares his heart for the pledged incision. Honouring his word gives him the Old Testament honour. When he abandons the New Testament mercy he turns worse than his enemy.

Shakespeare replays this theme in three lighter subplots. Usually such scenes are dismissed as “comic relief.” But in this material Shakespeare typically does not leave his serious concerns but replays them in more comic form. 

In the romantic scenes around the rings Portia promotes the breaking of promises. She makes Brabantio swear to keep her ring, then forces him to break his word and give it away — albeit to her, in her — again: false — role as judge. Her maid runs the same game on her suitor. While the Jew in Venice is destroyed for adhering to his oath, the gentiles in power in Venice prove their pledges worthless. The Jew in Venice is doomed by the Venetian hypocrisy as much as by his ambivalent integrity.

The clownish interlude with Shylock’s servant, Launcelot Gobbo, allows for antic wit and action but also with serious import. As the name echoes the British hero Lancelot, the servant is more at home — on the London stage as well as in

 its image of Venice — than Shylock is. He and Shylock’s daughter Jessica flee Shylock’s cold and miserly house, Launcelot by an open negotiation with Shylock, Jessica by furtively running off with the Christian Lorenzo, 

Furthermore, she takes — and wastes — a significant share of Shylock’s wealth. That pathetically includes a rich jewel he bestowed on his beloved wife, Leah. Both desertions are familiar plots from classical comedy, the irreverent servant and young lovers thwarting cold crusty senior authorities. Here they amplify Shylock’s loss. As Jessica moves from Shylock’s Old Testament world to Lorenzo’s New, her name is significant. Shakespeare drew it out of the Biblical Iscah, connoting knowledge of God. 

Launcelot provides a more sinister note in his first scene. First he wonders whether his urge to flee Shylock is the devil’s spur or the devil’s hold — a dilemma rooted in equating the Jew with the devil. When his blinded old father stumbles in, seeking him, the comical Launcelot cruelly confuses him by reporting himself dead. The father is heartbroken to have lost “the very staff of my age, my very prop.” This brief trick parallels Jessica’s heartbreaking desertion of her father. 

In contrast to Launcelot’s and Jessica’s abuse of their fathers, Portia vows to  respect her dead father’s wishes. She pledges to be ruled by and not to interfere with his demand that she marry the suitor who makes the correct choice from three caskets, one of which holds her picture. This standalone subplot appears not to fit in the larger story at all. Until it does. 

For the entire drama rests upon the need to discern between apparent and true worth — in caskets as in characters. The three caskets in Portia’s test represent differing metal values. The gold is “what many men desire.” Choosing the silver “shall get as much as he deserves.” But who chooses the lead “must give and hazard all he hath.” Only Bassanio chooses right (Spoiler alert: the lead). 

This test saves the Bassanio-Portia romance from its coarse beginnings. Penniless Bassanio needs Antonio’s money to woo the wealthy Portia. That she proves beautiful and lovable is a happy bonus. From this unromantic start, Bassanio redeems himself by his wise choice of casket. 

Portia’s presentation is the reverse. Initially her submission to her dead father’s will seems a proper alternative to Launcelot’s disrespect towards his father and the Jew’s respect for his Biblical forefathers. To her credit the wealthy clever woman would subordinate her romantic will to her father’s request. In the crux she is confident about the suitor she wants: “”If you do love me, you will find me out.” But this is as false a pretence as her commitment to “the quality of mercy.” Instead of passively accepting her father’s test, she subtly asserts her own desire.  

As in the later “trial,” Portia cheats. Unique among the three suitors we see making their choice, Portia has singers perform while Bassanio muses over the caskets. The lyrics direct his choice. The first verse sets up rhymes that suggest the conclusion on “lead”: bred, head, nourish-ed. The second advises against trusting the surface appeal, i.e., of silver and gold: “It is engender’d in the eyes, With gazing fed, and Fancy dies In the cradle where it lies: Let us all ring Fancy’s knell….” This prompts Bassanio’s choice: “So may the outward shows be least themselves — The world is still deceiv’d with ornament.” So he spurns the flashy surfaces of gold and silver for the less attractive front.

That, of course, is the primary theme of the entire drama. Among the characters as among those caskets we must be wary of a false allure, a false pretence to virtue, and see past apparent attraction for a more substantial, often hidden, value. Thus the apparent exposure of a cruel Jew rather works to expose his persecutors. His life ruined and his soul stolen, Shylock has exposed the triviality of the Venetian — which is to say the Christian — society. In this merchant of Venice, Antonio, the new ethic reverts to a cruelty it would rather accuse in another than confront in themselves. Such defensive projection recurs today. It’s human.

Back in 1814, William Hazlitt sympathized with Shylock more than with the Christians: “He is honest in his vices; they are hypocrites in their virtues.” Shylock clearly earns Lear’s claim to have been “more sinned against than sinning.” If only on this point one might tell the period Israelis — the Nazis had it right. (On this point, the author begs not to be quoted out of context.)