The Nineteenth-Century Merchant of Venice
Alyssa Johnson, Charleston Southern University
From the time of its original performances, The Merchant of Venice’s villain Shylock has been a notorious Jew. Shylock is a clear antagonist to all the play’s Christians, holding a special hatred for Antonio grounded in religious enmity and economic rivalry. Christian characters repeatedly refer to him as a “devil,” and his vengeful bargain to obtain Antonio’s flesh is obviously malicious. Shylock may not be morally upright, but neither are the play’s Christians. Shylock reminds Antonio he has patiently borne his abuses (spitting, kicking, and name-calling), “For sufferance is the badge of all our tribe” (I.iii.108). Antonio does not intend to stop his maltreatment, making Shylock’s actions seem quite justifiable. Portia, too, plays cruel tricks. At the play’s conclusion, Shylock is left alone in the world and forced to forsake his heritage and religion. Many productions conclude not with Act V but with this trial scene where Shylock is defeated, a cutting that highlights him either as a tragic victim or an overthrown villain.
While the play has always been fraught, early modern performances had no Jewish audience members because Jews were expelled from England in 1290 and not readmitted until 1656.1 By the nineteenth century, productions of The Merchant of Venice addressed an England where Jews were established members of society but were still the subject of political, social, and religious debates. As with any play, much is left to individual productions to interpret, particularly regarding the central role of Shylock. Performers generally depicted Shylock as a joke until Charles Macklin portrayed him in the mid-eighteenth century as “a terrifying, cruel, and malicious” villain in an antisemitic interpretation that leaned heavily on stereotypes (Martin n.p.). While Shylock had begun to be performed as an evil villain in the eighteenth century, the nineteenth century finally saw sympathetic renditions of the character.
Twenty-seven year old Edmund Kean’s performance as Shylock on January 26, 1814 at Drury Lane changed theatre and performance forever. His more sympathetic rendering of Shylock broke with the tradition of presenting him as a caricature or evil monster and brought intelligence and humanity to the role. This Shylock was a “dark, embittered, and impassioned villain” with “intense emotions and marked mood swings” (Davis 933). Kean’s performance shifted Shylock’s motivation, and “in the new Romantic age, the Jew was viewed as a victim of unjust external powers” (Reynolds 145). H. Barton-Baker recalls in 1879, decades after Kean’s Shylock and prompted by Irving’s Merchant of Venice, that Kean was “the great Shylock of modern times” (474). The first production became the stuff of legend, as others in the company believed Kean’s novel ideas would fail. However, he was wildly successful in presenting Shylock as a villain who was potentially redemptive, or at least sympathetic. Kean’s “compassionate treatment of Shylock” led to a radical shift: Shylock now had the possibility to be human, and audiences at this point could finally “appreciate it” (Lelyveld 45). After debuting as Shylock in London, Kean rose to fame and prominence, and his Shylock was seen by people like Lord Byron and Jane Austen. Kean’s influence on later Shylocks and productions of The Merchant of Venice can hardly be overstated.
Kean’s early life was exceptionally difficult, marked with illegitimacy, poverty, desertion, and an early entry to theatrical work. Some thought Kean’s sympathy for Shylock indicated he himself was Jewish, thinking “no one but a Jew could infuse Shylock with this awesome and terrifying tone of Hebraic majesty” (Lelyveld 53). As Hillebrand observes, a variety of writers have wondered if the Kean name was changed from Cohen and speculated that Kean himself was Jewish; however, no real evidence exists beyond “Kean’s dark coloring and the names of his uncles, Aaron and Moses” (6). Israel Zangwill also claimed “Kean was a Jew” (239).The 1906 Jewish encyclopedia lists him as the “son of Aaron Kean, a Jew,” but even this attribution of parentage is disputed (Jacobs and Mels). It is probable that his father was Edmund Kean, who was not Jewish (Thomson). Regardless, Kean’s difficult childhood likely contributed to his sympathy for Shylock. Kean gave two North American tours, the first to success and the second to great failure due to scandals in his personal life and a decision not to continue in Boston. Judith W. Page writes that his interpretation led iterations of Shylock to become “a cultural signifier of Jews and Jewishness” (116). Although not all critics believed Kean had interpreted Shylock accurately, others thought Shakespeare’s original design for the character had been revived. Kean’s name and work as Shylock continued to have a lasting theatrical legacy throughout the century, when Kean’s name still popped up in periodicals discussing Henry Irving’s later interpretation of Shylock.
William Charles Macready first played Shylock at Covent Garden on May 13, 1823. His performance paled in comparison to Kean’s work, which was at its height at this time, but he revisited the role sixteen years later at the Haymarket Theatre and eventually received general praise, if not self-satisfaction. Macready presented Shylock as not merely sympathetic but also as victimized. This “innovative” direction, “despite its inability to please some traditional-minded critics, proved influential” (Reynolds 146). Most notable about his productions of The Merchant of Venice was the care he brought to the staging of the play. Edmund Kean’s son Charles also took up the role of Shylock. Although Charles Kean worked to recreate his father’s Shylock, he lacked similar talent and was overshadowed by his father’s iconic work. Charles Kean’s productions were also more well known for their scenery than their acting, but later, when Charles Kean performed Shylock in the style of Macready, he was more well received by audiences.
In America, Edwin Booth performed as Shylock between 1853 and 1891. Instead of playing Shylock as sympathetic, Booth presented him as “a malevolent Jew,” “not molded in the Shylock-as-victim tradition,” which led “some critics [to find] Booth’s Shylock distasteful” and “a stubborn anachronism” (Reynolds 205-6). People expected him to follow in his father actor Junius Brutus Booth’s footsteps and infuse the role with “understanding and sympathy” (Lelyveld 63). Junius Brutus Booth clearly did research to prepare to play Shylock, attending a synagogue and studying the Talmud. Additionally, he performed using “a Yiddish accent and hand gestures” (Mayo 77). His son Edwin Booth’s later abrasive performances were not well-received by the British, who seemed to prefer Kean’s sympathetic Shylock. Booth performed the role differently throughout his lifetime, growing more “business-like” and making Shylock “a man of cold and deadly bearing” whose “Jewishness was scarcely apparent” (Lelyveld 68). However, Booth played Shylock at the same time as British actor Henry Irving in a friendly but simultaneous rivalry that sparked wide debate about whose Shylock was superior and whose was more authentic. This helps explain The Merchant of Venice’s surprising transatlantic popularity in the 1880s. While in England Kean’s sympathetic Shylock had long been around, “in America the idea had the force of novelty” as staged Jews tended to be “more villainous and flamboyant” (Hughes 258). Lelyveld notes that The Merchant of Venice was particularly popular in America because of post-Civil War “anti-Jewish prejudice,” which leaked out through journalists who “found opportunity for the expression of anti-Semitic sentiments in the Shylock story” (75). Unfortunately, the rise of the sympathetic Shylock did not necessarily indicate a less biased world.
Deeply important to the history of nineteenth-century productions of The Merchant of Venice is Henry Irving’s sympathetic Shylock, which he played for the first time at the Lyceum on November 1, 1879. This performance has been “recognized as a milestone in the representation of the Jew” (Nahshon 55). Irving was gifted at playing villainous characters, and his wildly successful production, also starring Ellen Terry in the role of Portia, “ran for 250 performances, a feat unprecedented for Shakespeare,” and then “remained active in Irving’s repertoire for the next twenty-four years” (Reynolds 219). Henry Irving became what Lelyveld thinks was “the greatest of all Shylocks” (79). Although Irving struggled with Shakespearean language and dealt with some vocal limitations, his work was widely praised. Not all critics loved his reading of Shakespeare or believed Shylock should even be sympathetic, but they acknowledged Irving’s mastery and popularity. Edna Nahshon writes that his work as Shylock “elevated” the “Stage Jew” from “theatrical tawdriness” (55). His stagings were famous for attempted authenticity and attention to detail, and working alongside the gifted and charismatic Ellen Terry benefited both actors. A front page article in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in December 1879 records Irving’s work as Shylock as “his best Shakespearian performance” and declares that he “shows him–as Shakespeare, we fancy, meant him to be shown–as a man in whom the persecution of his race, and the indignities inflicted on himself by those with whom he had to cope upon the mart, had begot a settled abhorrence of all Christian men, intensified and concentrated into ‘a lodged hate’ of Antonio” (“Theatrical Reform” 654).
Irving’s Shylock was purportedly inspired by a visit to Morocco, where he admired the “dignity and emotionalism of the Levantine Jews he had seen while cruising the Mediterranean” (Hughes 249). Irving read and presented Shylock as deeply religious and learned, and while he retained the character’s malevolence, he imbued the character with dignity.2 His choice to portray Shylock so sympathetically made a significant impact on contemporary Jews. For instance, after Irving’s death in 1905, Malcolm C. Salaman asserted that Irving’s portrayal of Shylock “made himself the creditor of every self-respecting Jew” (qtd. in Nahshon 56). Jewish journalist Eliza Aria admired his performance, sharing that although she initially felt dumbstruck upon meeting Irving in 1897, she was able to speak when, “in the name of all the Jews, I ventured to thank him for his representation of Shylock’” (Qtd. in Gross 161). Gross points out that Irving’s portrayal was certainly “a positive act of choice” (160). Irving himself wrote in Impressions of America, “I look on Shylock as the type of a persecuted race; almost the only gentleman in the play and the most ill-used” (Qtd. in Lelyveld 82). In Irving’s productions, Shylock could be seen as a protagonist, albeit a dark, tragic, and vengeful one. Terry in particular saw Shylock as the hero, thrown into distinction by Portia’s “careless charm” that does not recognize “the callousness of the irresistible Christian world she represents” (Hughes 261). Her performance as Portia contributed to audience impressions that Shylock was a tragic figure whose actions were justifiable.
In addition to performing the role with dignity, Irving used other theatrical techniques to cast Shylock as sympathetic. He arranged the scenes to suggest Jessica’s elopement was inspired by romantic love alone, not disdain for her father, which makes Shylock look betrayed by his daughter. Irving added a pantomime of Shylock wearily crossing a bridge on his return home after Jessica’s elopement, a bit of stage business that further enhanced audience sympathy for the character. Further, he added an ensemble of Jews as background characters whose presence amplified the sympathy gained for Shylock, especially in the trial scene, where in response to Shylock’s forced conversion, the Jewish ensemble “received the news as they would have reacted to a striking thunderbolt” (Lelyveld 90). Reviewer H. Barton-Baker concluded, “a new and original Shylock has appeared in the person of Mr. Irving,” one “profoundly thoughtful and intellectual” that “seems more in consonance with the spirit of the age than the brilliant flashes and terrible bursts of passion” (474). Irving’s continued performances as Shylock alongside Ellen Terry’s Portia received consistently favorable responses from transatlantic audiences and critics alike for decades. Even though some still felt a humane Shylock was implausible, they could not deny the excellence and popularity of Irving’s Merchant of Venice. Irving’s later performances as Shylock seem to have been somewhat less sympathetic. Critic William Winter wrote that “When Irving first acted Shylock he manifested a poetically humanitarian ideal of the part,” but he felt that “as time passed a radical change in the personation was little by little effected, till at last, without entire abandonment of a purpose and power to awaken sympathy, it became the true Shylock of Shakespeare – hard, merciless, inexorable, terrible” (Qtd. in Gross 160). Conversely, in 1892 A. B. Walkley thought Irving’s work had retained its “idealized” qualities (Gross 160). However his acting choices shifted, Irving’s work clinched Shylock’s tragic status and above all dignified character, neither monster nor pure stereotype.
The famous Anglo-Jewish author Israel Zangwill found Shylock a deeply compelling character, “neither a mean usurer, nor a brooding fiend, nor a pathological figure, but a deeply intellectual Jew, probably of Spanish origin and Spanish pride, devoted to his daughter and his dead wife” (240). In “Shylock and Other Stage Jews,” a chapter in The Voice of Jerusalem (1921), Zangwill “deemphasizes authorial intent” and suggests that Shakespeare can and should be reconstructed (Nahshon 56). He contends that “with the elision of a few lines – to me of dubious authenticity – Shylock could be turned from an impossible monster into one of the finest of Shakespeare’s creations” (Zangwill 239). Nahshon even suggests that Zangwill’s Children of the Ghetto itself can be read as “his Jewish version of the myth of the old Jewish usurer and his beautiful young daughter” (Nahshon 56). For Zangwill, the identity of the actor playing Shylock mattered very much. He claims both Kean and Irving as Jewish, along with Moscovitch and Tree (239). He writes,
“It was not, however, till the performance by Edmund Kean – who replaced the Judas-beard by a black – that the full dignity of Shakespeare’s creation was revealed. And Kean was a Jew. Of the five Shylocks I have seen, four have had more or less Jewish blood […] But the fifth, whose blood is purely Scotch – Matheson Lang – was to me the most sympathetic of them all, possibly because he made his first appearance in his own house.” (239)
Zangwill states that Lang’s Shylock’s staging, which allowed audiences a glimpse into his home, allowed audiences to “see Shylock from within” (239). He goes so far as to suggest the most offensive moment in The Merchant of Venice, the aside in Act I, Scene iii, could have been “inserted by the commercial manager” rather than Shakespeare himself, who Zangwill suggests created an “unexpected humanisation of the Jew” in the face of a society that had rallied against the Jewish physician Rodrigo Lopez, indicted in a conspiracy against Queen Elizabeth (241). Zangwill argues that “these stumbling-blocks” should “be boldly removed, if Shylock is to remain credible to the modern mind,” stating, “It is not so important what Shakespeare meant as what he might mean to us,” envisioning not merely minor textual revisions but also how dramatic staging could make a positive impact (242). For Zangwill and other nineteenth-century Jews, the choices made in productions of The Merchant of Venice were important, as they could cultivate humanizing performances or blatant reproductions of harmful stereotypes.
The Merchant of Venice was significant in the nineteenth century even outside of staged performances. For example, Thomas Ingoldsby’s antisemitic illustrated poem, “The Merchant of Venice: A Legend of Italy,” published in Bentley’s Miscellany in January 1842, tells the story of The Merchant of Venice in rhyme form and depicts Shylock as an utter villain (429). Not only is he a caricature, but his lines are also spoken in a stereotypically Eastern European accent. The poem describes Shylock as “ugly a dog as you’d wish to behold, / For few in his tribe ‘mongst their Levis and Moseses / Sported so Jewish an eye, beard, and nose as his” (Ingoldsby 433). The fair Jessica is depicted as another stereotype: the young, exoticized, beautiful Jewess who needs saving by a Christian. Zangwill himself specifically disapproved of Jessica, calling her “the most detestable and the least Jewish character in all fiction” who “is capable of saying anything to please her Christian friends” (244). This image of Jessica persisted in the nineteenth century through stereotypes like that in Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. Ingoldsby’s antisemitic poem rests on prejudice, showing that although sympathetic Shylocks had begun to exist, they certainly did not quell antisemitic uses of the play.
In May 1850, writing for Fraser’s, George Fletcher argues that The Merchant of Venice builds a case for Christianity, which fits with the conversion project of using English literature to persuade Jews to become Christians. While Fletcher pities Shylock and condemns the “falsely Christian spirit of persecution,” his tone is patronizing and he overlooks Portia’s cruelty (501). Shylock is, for Fletcher, “a personation of Persecuted Judaism” (501). Fletcher’s article shows that even somewhat sympathetic receptions of Shylock were not necessarily free of prejudice. Other articles argued a balder case for Shylock’s justified vengeance. A Temple Bar article published in 1875 suggests that Shylock can be redeemed and “whitewashed” despite his reputation (“Shylock the Jew-ed” 66). The author demonstrates that Bassanio, Antonio, and Portia act with cruelty and are not as heroic as some readers think. The author writes, Shylock “loved his daughter–and his ducats too! Well, what else had he to love? The squalid Ghetto wherein he was forced to live? the yellow badge of scorn he was compelled to wear? the fine gentlemen who cursed him in their prosperity and cringed to him in their need?” (“Shylock the Jew-ed” 70). The unnamed author emphasizes the Christians characters’ hypocrisy and argues readings of the play should be more sympathetic to Shylock. So, as with staged productions, in the periodical press interpretations of The Merchant of Venice could vary widely.
Puns on the word “kind” saturate The Merchant of Venice. “Kind” can mean considerate or friendly, but the word can also refer to kin or subjects of the same type. These interlocking puns ask if the Jew and Christian can be truly alike. Shylock’s famous “Hath not a Jew eyes?” speech asks these same questions in the face of the Christians’ religious hatred. While Braunmuller thinks this speech is not a “declaration of a common humanity” but merely the shared desire “to revenge exchanged wrongs,” Shylock does ask what it is that makes people of the same kind (288). While Shylock is cruel and greedy, so are the Christians. He thinks to trick Antonio, but Portia tricks him, leaving him destitute and identity-less at the finale. Nineteenth-century readings of The Merchant of Venice highlight this question about religious difference, which continued to be asked and considered in productions of the play. Answers varied widely, yet the play’s sustained resonance ensured Shylock and questions about religious identity remained in the nineteenth-century spotlight.
1 In Shakespeare’s time, the few Jews in England generally needed “to make a secret of their race and religion” and were viewed “almost as mythical beasts” in “the popular imagination” (Barton 284). The initial play’s treatment of Jews likely stems from an incident in which Queen Elizabeth’s Portuguese Jewish physician “was tried and executed for his part in a supposed poisoning plot aimed against her” as well as influences from Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta (Barton 284).
2 Irving’s costume suggested a fifty-to-sixty year old man wearing “only a suggestion of the Oriental,” accompanied with a cane, “a dark fur-trimmed cloak relieved by a multi-coloured sash,” and “instead of the traditional yarmulke, … a velvet cap a little reminiscent of a tarbush” (Hughes 254).
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