The Question of Shylock

Abstract

As a sixteen-year-old schoolboy in Pretoria, I was required to study The Merchant of Venice; it was the prescribed Shakespeare text for matriculating students throughout the Transvaal. In a class of thirty boys, I and two others were Jews and, because of this, much of the teaching and discussion of the play was directed at us — not hostilely, but self-consciously, perhaps, as though the class would have been more comfortable if we had not been present. I have noticed, as a teacher myself, the difference it makes to the class when there is a black student present during the teaching of Othello. The class is more alert and self-conscious because of the presence of the black student, especially during the inevitable discussions of miscegenation that the play produces. The usually unspoken question to the white students is ‘How would your parents react if you were to arrive home with a black boy/ girlfriend?’ It creates discomfort and unease for most of the white middle-class Canadians for whom the idea of an interracial romantic relationship is quite foreign.