The Merchant of Venice: the Enigmatic Shylock

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The Merchant of Venice: The Enigmatic Shylock Compiled by Gwen Sandberg From Insights, 1992 The Merchant of Venice is one of Shakespeare's best known plays. It is the play most frequently taught in schools and the one most people read first. Even so the play is a difficult one for modern audiences because of the enigmatic nature of Shylock. Is he comic or tragic? Are we to take him seriously or laugh at him? Should modern liberal attitudes influence our response to Shylock, or should we continue to remember the stereotypes of earlier centuries and vaudevillian depictions of Jews? Characterization of Shylock has troubled thoughtful students of Shakespeare, and several theories have been brought forth to explain the inscrutable money lender. One theory holds that The Merchant of Venice arose from a melancholy occasion. In l594 Queen Elizabeth's chief physician, Roderigo Lopez, who was descended from a Spanish Jewish family, was accused by Essex of participating in a Spanish plot against the queen's life, was found guilty, and sentenced to death. After some weeks of delay in which Elizabeth seems to have considered mercy, the efforts of Essex prevailed, and in June the sentence was carried out in the spectacular manner of the time. The Rose Theatre capitalized on these events by reviving Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, wherein Barrabas tries to poison a whole city full of Christians and is finally plunged, to the delight of any contemporary audience, into a boiling cauldron. Apparently, so this theory goes, Shakespeare's company thought it necessary to offer a competing attraction, and Shakespeare was asked to provide a script. He looked around for a story on which he could impose a grotesque and dangerous Lopez, and, finding a fourteenth century plot which had the necessary elements, all ensued much as we have it in the play. This theory has some difficulties, as

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