Abstract
Reformation preoccupation with the Hebrew Bible and covenant theology encouraged a connection to biblical Jews and patriarchal religion that opens a more sympathetic early modern reading of Shylock. Shylock’s “merry bond,” Kietzman argues, is a covenantal commitment to respond beyond the letter of law to the other, which he does when he breaks his custom to dine with the Christians. Shylock’s identification with Jacob the wrestler enables his interfaith reach, but the Christians claim identity with Jacob the thief; and when the Christians steal Shylock’s daughter, he breaks his covenant and reduces the bond to a contract in order to claim the pound of flesh penalty.
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Notes
- 1.
Emma Smith, “Was Shylock Jewish?” Shakespeare Quarterly 64 (Summer 2013): 199, 195, 219.
- 2.
Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (New York: Norton, 2004), 271. Kenneth Gross, Shylock is Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 3.
- 3.
David Womersley, Divinity and State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 297.
- 4.
Douglas Anderson believes that “Shakespeare brought a deeply religious perception to bear on the sordid conflict between religions,” and Anderson believes that forgiveness and mercy are key to that religious vision which “are rooted in Shylock’s faith.” Douglas Anderson, “The Old Testament Presence in The Merchant of Venice,” ELH: English Literary History 52 (Spring 1985): 119.
- 5.
Daniel Elazar, Covenant and Polity in Biblical Israel (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1995), 31.
- 6.
Beatrice Groves, The Destruction of Jerusalem in Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 141.
- 7.
Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta, ed. James R. Siemon (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2009); Groves, Destruction of Jerusalem, 127.
- 8.
“Shylock the Jew” is referred to as a figure of “extreme cruelty” on the title page of the first quarto. Greenblatt, Will in the World, 280; Groves, Destruction of Jerusalem, 43.
- 9.
Gross, Shylock is Shakespeare, 10.
- 10.
Achsah Guibbory, Christian Identity, Jews, and Israel in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 3.
- 11.
Groves, Destruction of Jerusalem, 44–48. Groves notes that between 1545 and 1695, there was a “marked rise” in the children baptized with Old Testament names.
- 12.
Henry VIII established endowed Hebrew chairs at Cambridge (1540) and Oxford (1546). Cecil Roth claims that the renaissance of Hebrew studies in England began with King Henry VIII’s desperate search for an interpretation of biblical law that would render his marriage to his brother’s widow null and void. Cecil Roth, A History of the Jews of England, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), 145.
- 13.
Dan Isaac, “The Worth of a Jew’s Eye: Reflections of the Talmud in The Merchant of Venice,” MAARAV 8 (1992): 349–374.
- 14.
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. “Broughton, Hugh.”
- 15.
Jason Rosenblatt, England’s Chief Rabbi: John Selden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 3, 66. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. “Selden, John.”
- 16.
Beatrice Groves, Texts and Traditions: Religion in Shakespeare 1592–1604 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 17–21. Of the Jews in these plays, Emma Smith comments that “they are rare and sufficiently diverse to compromise any claim that they constitute an available stereotype,” Smith, “Was Shylock Jewish?” 203.
- 17.
See Beatrice Groves’ discussion of John Smith’s “The Destruction of Jerusalem” (1584) in Destruction of Jerusalem, 59–69. It is very significant that the Josippon was first printed in 1558 by a printer, Richard Jugge, who had been printing the New Testament since 1547, and it was reprinted thirteen times before 1615.
- 18.
Groves, Destruction of Jerusalem, 57.
- 19.
Smith, “Was Shylock Jewish?” 204–209.
- 20.
Adelman decides that Gerontus must be an antitype to Shylock, and she constructs “Usury,” who is never explicitly marked as Jewish, as a prototype of Shylock. Janet Adelman, Blood Relations: Christian and Jew in The Merchant of Venice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 15, 20.
- 21.
Adelman, Blood Relations, 62.
- 22.
Robert Clark and Claire Sponsler, “Othered Bodies: Racial Cross-Dressing in the Mistere de la Sainte Hostie and the Croxton Play of the Sacrament,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 29 (Winter 1999): 71.
- 23.
Interesting that Caliban’s gabardine serves as a tent for Trinculo, who is desperate for shelter from the tempest. If gabardine, as I am suggesting, figures creatureliness or, more literally, skin, the dramatic emblem shows that humanness may be unfolded or expanded to cover others.
- 24.
Robert Hornback, “The Jacob and Esau Paradigm: Nicholas Udall’s Predestinarian Problem Comedy,” in Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England, eds. James D. Mardock and Kathryn R. McPherson (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2014), 77. Hornback discusses the way this play “rationalized new conduct”—commercial self-interest.
- 25.
For discussions of the contradiction in Jacob , who is both a heel and a tam (righteous man), see Alter, Art of Biblical Narrative, 50. See also Gabriel Josipovici, “A Tale of a Heel and a Hip,” Comparative Criticism 21 (1999): 21–34.
- 26.
Janet Adelman notes that Jacob ’s status is contested but she frames the contest not as I do through the discrepant biblical stories but through the Pauline dichotomy of flesh and spirit. Adelman, Blood Relations, 45.
- 27.
Julia Reinhard Lupton. Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 63.
- 28.
Steven Marx, Shakespeare and the Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 110–111. Norman Rabkin notes that all of the many schematic interpretations of a supersession narrative founder on the fact that “not all the Christians in the play are ideal Christians.” Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 9–10.
- 29.
By “Christian supersession” of “Christian triumphalism,” I refer to the idea in Christian hermeneutics that the passage of paternal inheritance from elder to younger brothers (Ishmael to Isaac and Esau to Jacob ) signifies the passage of the promise from an “older” Judaism to a “younger” Christianity. Barbara Lewalski, reading typologically, makes the play “a kind of Divine Comedy.” Barbara Lewalski, “Biblical Allusion and Allegory in The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Quarterly 13 (1962): 328. For a more nuanced discussion of Shakespeare’s use of the supersession narrative in Merchant see Adelman, Blood Relations, 50.
- 30.
Adelman, Blood Relations, 52. Her discussion of John Foxe’s anxieties surrounding this doctrine in “A Sermon Preached at the Christening of a Certain Jew” is especially useful, 33.
- 31.
Smith argues that the play is very much concerned with friction between European strangers who enter the play via “Tubal,” who is the biblical progenitor of the gentiles. Smith, “Was Shylock Jewish?” 212–214.
- 32.
Groves reads Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta as a radical critique of Christian triumphalism and cultural imperialism. The setting of Malta evokes Catholic thefts from Jews to fund Crusades, while Shakespeare’s Venetian setting evokes the potential common ground of commerce as a sphere of exchange that is open to covenantal intermediation. Groves, Destruction of Jerusalem, 125–126.
- 33.
This regression is, I think, what leads Stanley Stewart to say that Shylock is more like Laban than Jacob . Stanley Stewart, “Shylock and Jacob, the Patriarch,” Cithara 46 (Nov. 2006): 33.
- 34.
Robert Alter, Art of Biblical Narrative (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 50.
- 35.
Greenblatt, Will in the World, 281–282. Repetition, as in “there, there, there,” is the main technique for representing inwardness.
- 36.
Lupton, Citizen-Saints, 80; William Tyndale, Doctrinal Treatises and Introductions to Different Portions of the Holy Scriptures, ed. Henry Walter (Cambridge: at the University Press, 1848. Reprint: New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1968), 398.
- 37.
Tyndale, Doctrinal Treatises, 401; John Calvin, Commentaries on the First Book of Moses, Called Genesis, rranslated by John King (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1979), 2: 107.
- 38.
Although Marlowe’s Barabas alludes to figures from the Bible, he does not apply them to his own situation. When his fellow Jews compare him to Job , for example, he itemizes Job’s wealth, says that he was richer than Job, but shows no proclivity to identify in any deep way with the biblical prototype of suffering. Marlowe, Jew of Malta, 1.2.183–199.
- 39.
Shakespeare seems to have learned something from Spenser who holds off naming characters allegorically until after the reader has seen them in action and makes her own determinations. Shylock will not name Jacob until he offers Jacob as a model of thrift as blessing.
- 40.
John Russell Brown, who believes the subtext of Shylock’s role is key to its realization in performance, also notes the allusion to Jacob ’s wrestling. He doesn’t do much with the biblical allusions, the particulars of which early modern auditors would have followed. Brown, “The Realization of Shylock: A Theatrical Criticism,” in Shylock, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1991), 183–197, 193.
- 41.
Avivah Zornberg, The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis (New York: Doubleday, 1995), 234.
- 42.
Daniel Elazar reminds us that covenants do not necessarily end strife but contain it within certain bonds. Jacob makes peace with Esau but determines to keep him at arm’s length. The main point seems to be that the brothers are engaged and negotiating. Elazar, Covenant and Polity in Biblical Israel, 149.
- 43.
Sigurd Burckhardt notes the way Shylock’s imagination is triggered by words. For example, when Antonio proudly says of usury, “I do never use it,” Shylock begins his story of Jacob ’s ewes. Sigurd Burckhardt, “The Merchant of Venice: The Gentle Bond,” ELH: English Literary History 29 (Sep. 1962): 245.
- 44.
Shakespeare uses the Latinate word “covenant” seven times in the canon (three in Cymbeline, two in I Henry VI, one in Taming of the Shrew, and one in Richard II). His choice of the word “bond,” derived from Anglo-Saxon with the same meaning and range of usages (forty in Merchant), supports my sense of him lifting a concept out of a narrow theological context to explore its wide application in human life and thought. Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd ed., s.v., “covenant,” “bond.” Shakespeare Condordance, s.v. “covenant,” http://opensourceshakespeare.org/concordance.
- 45.
In Genesis 21, just before Abraham ’s Akedah trial, he and Abimelech (a neighboring king) enter into a “covenant” for well rights (Gen. 21:27). In Genesis 31, after Laban has pursued and caught Jacob , who had absconded with flocks and family, Jacob suggests that they make peace through a “covenant” (Gen. 31:44).
- 46.
Milton uses the word “sufficient” to describe “man” in the famous phrase where God describes the covenant and foresees man’s violation of it: “I made him just and right, / Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.” John Milton, “Paradise Lost,” The Complete Poetry of John Milton, ed. John T. Shawcross (New York: Anchor Books, 1963), 3.95–99.
- 47.
Calvin, Commentary on Genesis, 1: 155, 156. Calvin struggles to interpret Jacob ’s “works” because they run counter to Paul’s reading of Jacob as preferred solely by “election not by works” (Romans 9:11). Finally, he approves works performed in response to calling as an expression of faith.
- 48.
Shylock’s character manifests what Lupton describes as the “characteristically Jewish tension between the unique election and identity of Israel as a nation apart and the potential universality of its historical example.” Lupton, Citizen-Saints, 150.
- 49.
Rebekah thrust Jacob onto the stage, “clothed … and covered his hands and the smooth of his neck with the skins of the kids of the goats” (27:15–16), because she believed his acting was the way to fulfill God’s word to her that “the elder shall serve the younger” (25:23). Calvin has a great deal of trouble with Rebekah’s evident desire “to sport in sacred manner with such wiles,” and he criticizes her illegitimate method of action but, at the same time, understands that it was inspired by “her extraordinary faith.” Calvin, Commentary on Genesis, 1: 84–85.
- 50.
Josipovici notes that the men’s attitudes to biblical narratives marks their difference: Shylock relates to the biblical characters as if family members while Antonio seems not to know the particulars of their stories. Josipovici, “Tale of a Heel and a Hip,” 27.
- 51.
Calvin believes “Jacob was divinely inspired thus to act,” but his commentaries dwell, nevertheless, on the morality of Jacob’s various actions. Calvin, Commentary on Genesis, 1: 153.
- 52.
Greenblatt discusses both John Shakespeare’s and William Shakespeare’s own moneylending in Will in the World, 271–272.
- 53.
Charting the shift from religious covenants to civil ones, Elazar reminds us that traditionally God or a higher moral power is at least a guarantor of the relationship, if not a direct party. Elazar, Covenant and Polity, 31. See also Lewis Hyde’s history of the acceptance of usury among Protestant Reformers in The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World (New York: Random House, 1979), 142–182. For both Jews and Christians, usury symbolizes the boundary between brothers and others; therefore, Shylock’s gift is unexpectedly generous—an ethical rather than a commercial gesture.
- 54.
Antonio will grudgingly engage in limited partnership but not in friendship which continues to leave Shylock on the margins of the human community—outside justice and the political community. See Henry S. Turner, “The Problem of the More-than-One: Friendship, Calculation, and Political Association in The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Quarterly 57 (Winter 2006): 435.
- 55.
Lupton, Citizen-Saints, 129.
- 56.
Covenant obligations exceed the letter of the law and are no limited by “the narrowest contractual requirements,” Elazar, Covenant and Polity in Biblical Israel, 31.
- 57.
Janet Adelman also understands Jessica’s disguise and theft of patrimony as a “version of Jacob ’s theft” that comments ironically on the passage of the promise from Jew to Christian. Adelman, Blood Relations, 67.
- 58.
Henry Turner understands Shylock’s cruel legalism as a return in kind of the Christian denial to give him not only financial interest but “the usury of kindness that originates in friendship.” Turner, “The Problem of the More-than-One,” 436.
- 59.
Kenneth Gross suggests that the knife brings “memories of ritual sacrifice” and states that “Shylock is Abraham ready to kill Isaac .” Gross, Shylock is Shakespeare, 99. Shylock is “un-Abrahamic” because he is too willing to “sacrifice” Antonio. Unlike Ken Jackson’s approach to the “Abrahamic,” I read the Akedah as a test of Abraham’s belief (in a God of sacrifice or covenant promise) and a test of his ability to honor his covenant with God, while being true to the ethical commitment to his son Isaac. Jackson, “Shylock: The Knight of Faith?” JCRT 8 (Fall 2007): 75. My reading is supported by Jon Levenson, who describes the emotional and psychological journey of Abraham to Mount Moriah as one in which he, through enactment, the true meaning of covenant. Levenson, Inheriting Abraham: The Legacy of the Patriarch in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012).
- 60.
Udall’s play Jacob and Esau , because it foregrounds Rebekah’s role as Jacob’s acting coach—“play thy part well, and stick to it throughout,” could have influenced Shakespeare’s representation of Portia’s cross-dressed performance. [Udall], A Nevve Mery and vvittie Comedie or Enterlude, Newely Imprinted, Treating vpon the Historie of Iacob and Esau Taken out of the xxvij. Chap. of the First Booke of Moses Entituled Genesis. London: Henrie Brynneman, 1568. Early English Books Online: Texts Creation Partnership, http://eebo.chadwyck.com/home.
- 61.
Balthazar is also the name of one of the three Kings or “wise men,” but also Balthazar is the villain in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy.
- 62.
Romans 9:11, in which Paul notes that before Jacob and Esau were born—“before they have neither done good nor evil”—God told Rebekah that he would “call” the younger, as Paul says, to show that “election” matters, not “works.”
- 63.
Geoffrey Carnall, “Shakespeare’s Richard III and St. Paul,” Shakespeare Quarterly 14 (1963): 186–188. Helen Whall’s article is particularly good on demonstrating Shakespeare’s evident ambivalence toward Saint Paul and the way his attitudes shifted throughout his career. Helen Whall, “Divining Paul in Shakespeare’s Comedies,” Hellas 7 (Spring 1996): 29–37.
- 64.
Lisa Hopkins makes the observation that Richard’s frequent invocations of Saint Paul enable him to transcend his deformed natural body to claim a mystical one. Lisa Hopkins, “’Now By St. Paul: Richard III’s Constitutency,” Q/W/E/R/T/Y: arts, literatures & civilisations du monde anglophone 9 (October 1999): 11–14.
- 65.
In the biblical-covenantal view of marriage, two independent and otherwise unrelated persons unite to become “one flesh.” Elazar, Covenant and Polity in Biblical Israel, 29.
- 66.
Because listening is so important to the match Portia makes, her idea of marriage seems to be closer to Milton’s expressed idea of a “meet and happie conversation.”
- 67.
Jeffrey Knapp has a very astute discussion of the way Saint. Paul’s ideas about accommodationism sanction acting for both preachers and players. Knapp, Shakespeare’s Tribe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 34–36.
- 68.
Naseeb Shaheen notes this connection in Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays (Newark: Delaware University Press, 1999), 180. Douglas Anderson is especially good on explicating the expressive purposes of Portia’s Old Testament references. Anderson, “Old Testament Presence in The Merchant of Venice,” 123.
- 69.
Shakespeare would have had special familiarity with Deuteronomy, since antitheatricalist writers frequently quoted its injunction against cross-dressing.
- 70.
Adelman returns repeatedly to the anxieties surrounding the betrayal of fathers in the play, and she views Shylock as occupying the position of betrayed father and displaced elder brother. Adelman, Blood Relations, 58–59.
- 71.
Isolated commentators note the way Portia’s reasoning mimics the thrust of the Talmud toward a more humane reconstruction of the law in personal injury cases. See Isaac, “The Worth of a Jew’s Eye,” 355; Aryeh Botwinick, “Shakespeare in Advance of Hobbes: Pathways to Modernization of the European Psyche as Charted in The Merchant of Venice,” Telos 153 (Winter 2010): 132–159.
- 72.
Although he does not make this point, Sigurd Burckhardt believes Portia won by “submitting to [the bond’s] rigor more rigorously than even the Jew had thought to do.” Burckhardt, Shakespearean Meanings (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), 210. See also Lupton’s reading of Portia’s ruling as true to Christ’s intention not to deviate from the law “one iote” in Citizen-Saints, 92.
- 73.
Blind Isaac is deceived by Jacob , the actor who substitutes for Esau . Even when he learns of the deceit, he ratifies the blessing because of the uncanny awareness that he is somehow reliving a version of the Akedah, the earlier drama when his own father would have sacrificed him had God not provided a substitute sheep. Both deceived fathers in Merchant—Old Gobbo and Shylock—are associated with sacrifice. Old Gobbo carries doves (traditionally a sin offering) and Shylock is calling for sacrifice.
- 74.
Ken Jackson notes that we do not know what happens in the moment when Shylock is thrust into Abraham’s role. Jackson, “Shylock: The Knight of Faith?” 75.
- 75.
Marx, Shakespeare and the Bible, 29.
- 76.
Anderson reads Portia’s “tricksiness with the rings” as her negotiation of a “second ‘covenant’.” Anderson, “The Old Testament Presence in The Merchant of Venice,” 128.
- 77.
Adelman, Blood Relations, 65.
- 78.
George Herbert’s poem, “The Jews” offers support for the notion that an early modern writer could be critical of supersession: “Poore nation, whose sweet sap, and juice / Ourcyens have purloin’d, and left you drie.” Cited in Noam Finkler, “Biblical and Rabbinic Intertextuality in George Herbert’s ‘The Collar’ and ‘The Pearl,’” in Religious Diversity and Early Modern English Texts: Catholic, Judaic, Feminist, and Secular Dimensions, eds. Arthur Marotti and Chanita Goodblatt (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2013): 230–250, 339.
- 79.
Josipovici, The Book of God: A Response to the Bible (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 86.
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Kietzman, M.J. (2018). The Merchant of Venice: Shylock and Covenantal Interplay. In: The Biblical Covenant in Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71843-9_3
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