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Shylock Is Shakespeare
Shylock, the Jewish moneylender in The Merchant of Venice who famously demands a pound of flesh as security for a loan to his antisemitic tormentors, is one of Shakespeare’s most complex and idiosyncratic characters. With his unsettling eloquence and his varying voices of protest, play, rage, and refusal, Shylock remains a source of perennial fascination. What explains the strange and enduring force of this character, so unlike that of any other in Shakespeare’s plays? Kenneth Gross posits that the figure of Shylock is so powerful because he is the voice of Shakespeare himself.
Marvelously speculative and articulate, Gross’s book argues that Shylock is a breakthrough for Shakespeare the playwright, an early realization of the Bard’s power to create dramatic voices that speak for hidden, unconscious, even inhuman impulses—characters larger than the plays that contain them and ready to escape the author’s control. Shylock is also a mask for Shakespeare’s own need, rage, vulnerability, and generosity, giving form to Shakespeare’s ambition as an author and his uncertain bond with the audience. Gross’s vision of Shylock as Shakespeare’s covert double leads to a probing analysis of the character’s peculiar isolation, ambivalence, opacity, and dark humor. Addressing the broader resonance of Shylock, both historical and artistic, Gross examines the character’s hold on later readers and writers, including Heinrich Heine and Philip Roth, suggesting that Shylock mirrors the ambiguous states of Jewishness in modernity.
A bravura critical performance, Shylock Is Shakespeare will fascinate readers with its range of reference, its union of rigor and play, and its conjectural—even fictive—means of coming to terms with the question of Shylock, ultimately taking readers to the very heart of Shakespeare’s humanizing genius.
Marvelously speculative and articulate, Gross’s book argues that Shylock is a breakthrough for Shakespeare the playwright, an early realization of the Bard’s power to create dramatic voices that speak for hidden, unconscious, even inhuman impulses—characters larger than the plays that contain them and ready to escape the author’s control. Shylock is also a mask for Shakespeare’s own need, rage, vulnerability, and generosity, giving form to Shakespeare’s ambition as an author and his uncertain bond with the audience. Gross’s vision of Shylock as Shakespeare’s covert double leads to a probing analysis of the character’s peculiar isolation, ambivalence, opacity, and dark humor. Addressing the broader resonance of Shylock, both historical and artistic, Gross examines the character’s hold on later readers and writers, including Heinrich Heine and Philip Roth, suggesting that Shylock mirrors the ambiguous states of Jewishness in modernity.
A bravura critical performance, Shylock Is Shakespeare will fascinate readers with its range of reference, its union of rigor and play, and its conjectural—even fictive—means of coming to terms with the question of Shylock, ultimately taking readers to the very heart of Shakespeare’s humanizing genius.
216 pages, Hardcover
First published December 1, 2006
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 31, 2016
My first response to this book was tactile. I am a bit of a book fondler and this is a remarkably well put together volume. Thank you, UChicago. I will remember your printer's matchless effort. Once my hands stopped orgasming, I thoroughly enjoyed the author's narrative as well. Kudos.
August 8, 2024
"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 Merchant of Venice: Shylock Monologue (Act 3 Scene 1)]
“It is hard to settle one’s questions about Shylock. Shakespeare has invented in him a peculiarly tough kind of puzzle, resistant yet drawing energy into it like a black hole. He must have wanted that. Shylock does not organize revelations about himself as other of Shakespeare’s major characters do, partly because of how he is both cast out and yet stays present at the end of the play. John Hollander writes of the history of scholarly commentary on him that “every added bit of critical insight only tends to collect in the pool of indeterminacy, rather than to open a sluice out of it.” [Kenneth Gross]
There’s no denying that Shakespeare's depiction of the character of Shylock is one of his greatest triumphs. The name Shylock has become a byword for greed, passion, avarice, shrewdness, insincerity and unkindness.
We know Shylock in this play as money-lender, as a fanatic follower of his religion as a hater of Christianity, as a two-faced and crafty man. He can lay a trap for his enemy and even catch him, as a tyrannical father, as a hoarder of money, and as a vengeful and vicious person.
All these aspects of Shylock's personality have been presented to us most vividly and through realistic situations. Shylock's portrait given by Shakespeare is complete in all respects. He is an extraordinary creation of Shakespeare's fertile and prolific genius. We see shylock in different ways and different moods. We see him in his household, on the Rialto, in his business dealings, in his devotion to his religious beliefs, in his dealings with his fellow Jews and with Christians.
We are into the contact with almost every segment of Venetian society through him. Shylock nevertheless presents the most interesting psychological study in the play. In making an analysis of his character there are two things we have to bear in mind:
1) Shakespeare had to allow for the prevalent anti-Semitic prejudices of his time and he had to conform the some respect at least to the tradition of the Jew as a monster of cruelty and rapacity-a tradition which had been handed down from the middle ages.
2) It was invariably Shakespeare's practice to keep his characters within the pale of humanity even when the exigencies of his plot required that he should depict some of them as villains villains are highly reprehensible from the ethical stand-point, and If the actions of these from that of stand able as having arisen from circumstances not entirely with in the control of the villains concerned.
This book shows us that Shylock was by no means a persona non grata in Venice. Antonio had a particular dislike of him, a dislike amounting to curious combination of hatred and contempt, but the dislike was by no means confined to Antonio. The ill-feeling against Shylock was not entirely due to his nationality and his religion. Rather it is to be traced to the fact that Shylock embodied in himself all the most unpleasant features of the race to which he belonged.
What the author has tried to show in this book is that Shylock has an atomic quality, compact yet explosive. His power lies in an emerging isolation of purpose and person—what he will call his “bond”—and in his refusal to be answerable to the ordinary terms of law or reason, at the same time as he makes the law his own. It lies also in an idiosyncratic eloquence that at once exposes and occults Shylock’s inner life, even as his words show the world a mirror of its hidden rage. This eloquence has its darkly comic as well as its tragic aspects. His character embodies what you might call a poetics of repugnancy. There is something in Shylock that resists absorption or clarification. He is like a Möbius strip, his inside and outside continually turning into one another.
Shylock’s ferocious idiosyncrasy makes a strange place for The Merchant of Venice within the Shakespearean canon as a whole. In the play, a character intended as one piece of a larger dramatic machine so draws the poet’s attention that he gains a life that threatens to dominate or deform the whole.
The author says: “Shylock's isolation as character also mirrors Shakespeare's isolation as author. Shylock provides us a mirror of Shakespeare's sense of himself as a human author, as a creator of artifacts for the stage, and of his violence against those creations. Shylock shows us the vexed conditions of the playwright's success, in particular as he reflects something about Shakespeare's uncertain bond with his audience, the world that eats his children by eye and ear, a world on which Shakespeare takes his own kind of revenge* Shylock's rage is Shakespeare's rage.”
A most well researched and interesting book!!
“It is hard to settle one’s questions about Shylock. Shakespeare has invented in him a peculiarly tough kind of puzzle, resistant yet drawing energy into it like a black hole. He must have wanted that. Shylock does not organize revelations about himself as other of Shakespeare’s major characters do, partly because of how he is both cast out and yet stays present at the end of the play. John Hollander writes of the history of scholarly commentary on him that “every added bit of critical insight only tends to collect in the pool of indeterminacy, rather than to open a sluice out of it.” [Kenneth Gross]
There’s no denying that Shakespeare's depiction of the character of Shylock is one of his greatest triumphs. The name Shylock has become a byword for greed, passion, avarice, shrewdness, insincerity and unkindness.
We know Shylock in this play as money-lender, as a fanatic follower of his religion as a hater of Christianity, as a two-faced and crafty man. He can lay a trap for his enemy and even catch him, as a tyrannical father, as a hoarder of money, and as a vengeful and vicious person.
All these aspects of Shylock's personality have been presented to us most vividly and through realistic situations. Shylock's portrait given by Shakespeare is complete in all respects. He is an extraordinary creation of Shakespeare's fertile and prolific genius. We see shylock in different ways and different moods. We see him in his household, on the Rialto, in his business dealings, in his devotion to his religious beliefs, in his dealings with his fellow Jews and with Christians.
We are into the contact with almost every segment of Venetian society through him. Shylock nevertheless presents the most interesting psychological study in the play. In making an analysis of his character there are two things we have to bear in mind:
1) Shakespeare had to allow for the prevalent anti-Semitic prejudices of his time and he had to conform the some respect at least to the tradition of the Jew as a monster of cruelty and rapacity-a tradition which had been handed down from the middle ages.
2) It was invariably Shakespeare's practice to keep his characters within the pale of humanity even when the exigencies of his plot required that he should depict some of them as villains villains are highly reprehensible from the ethical stand-point, and If the actions of these from that of stand able as having arisen from circumstances not entirely with in the control of the villains concerned.
This book shows us that Shylock was by no means a persona non grata in Venice. Antonio had a particular dislike of him, a dislike amounting to curious combination of hatred and contempt, but the dislike was by no means confined to Antonio. The ill-feeling against Shylock was not entirely due to his nationality and his religion. Rather it is to be traced to the fact that Shylock embodied in himself all the most unpleasant features of the race to which he belonged.
What the author has tried to show in this book is that Shylock has an atomic quality, compact yet explosive. His power lies in an emerging isolation of purpose and person—what he will call his “bond”—and in his refusal to be answerable to the ordinary terms of law or reason, at the same time as he makes the law his own. It lies also in an idiosyncratic eloquence that at once exposes and occults Shylock’s inner life, even as his words show the world a mirror of its hidden rage. This eloquence has its darkly comic as well as its tragic aspects. His character embodies what you might call a poetics of repugnancy. There is something in Shylock that resists absorption or clarification. He is like a Möbius strip, his inside and outside continually turning into one another.
Shylock’s ferocious idiosyncrasy makes a strange place for The Merchant of Venice within the Shakespearean canon as a whole. In the play, a character intended as one piece of a larger dramatic machine so draws the poet’s attention that he gains a life that threatens to dominate or deform the whole.
The author says: “Shylock's isolation as character also mirrors Shakespeare's isolation as author. Shylock provides us a mirror of Shakespeare's sense of himself as a human author, as a creator of artifacts for the stage, and of his violence against those creations. Shylock shows us the vexed conditions of the playwright's success, in particular as he reflects something about Shakespeare's uncertain bond with his audience, the world that eats his children by eye and ear, a world on which Shakespeare takes his own kind of revenge* Shylock's rage is Shakespeare's rage.”
A most well researched and interesting book!!
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews