Abstract
Shylock is a Jewface role, whose effect is to create stereotypes and to distort Jewish ethnicity and religious practice. Yet it is also more than that, as Shakespeare created a complex character who sometimes invites a kind of identification. This article will argue that practicing rhetorical listening and thinking about identifications in The Merchant of Venice – and how they are created especially through sound – can help us to understand the complexities of this paradoxical character. In particular, theories of disidentification and non-identification can help to map out patterns of possible identifications, vexed and otherwise, within the play.
In 2021 the Jewish comic Sarah Silverman provoked controversy when she criticised Hollywood's frequent representation of Jewish protagonists by non-Jewish actors. Although she did not originate the term, which was already in use by literary and theatrical scholars, she referred to this practice as ‘Jewface’, a semantic choice that emphasises the similarity of the phenomenon to ‘blackface’ and the racist performance history associated with that term. More recently, regarding the 2023 film Maestro, the selection of non-Jewish actors for the roles of Leonard Bernstein and his wife stirred controversy, an issue that was compounded by the use of a prosthetic nose by the actor portraying Bernstein.
As is the case with blackface and its caricaturing of racial difference, because non-Jewish actors lack the authentic experience of Jewishness in its infinite variety and subtle shadings of difference, they may instead perform the stereotype, the cliché, the misrepresentation, the outsider's fantasy of what constitutes Judaism. Thus, the effect of Jewface can be to create new stereotypes and accentuate existing ones as well as to distort Jewish ethnicity and religious practice. This phenomenon has been observed in histories of the American stage, where ‘the ways in which non-Jewish entertainers had parodied Jews on the vaudeville stage set the standard for how Jews were supposed to look, act and speak on Broadway, and thus even Jewish actors tended to perform Jewish roles in ways that satisfied the expectations of audiences’. 1 Jewface thus creates a funhouse mirror reality, where non-Jews invent a stereotype, whose artificiality is then imposed upon Jewish actors, whose performance of the stereotype gives it even more substance. The authentic reality of Jews and Judaism is lost in all this.
In this article, the discussion of ‘Jewface’ will focus on how Shakespeare's text itself enacts this phenomenon and will emphasise one aspect of Jewface: the Jew's voice. That is, the article will explore how Shakespeare's text marks Shylock's difference through language and other kinds of aural cues, encouraging or discouraging identifications. As Sander Gilman has noted: ‘Within the European tradition of seeing the Jew as different, there is a closely linked tradition of hearing the Jew's language as marked by the corruption of being a Jew’. 2 Signifying as strongly as the badges and distinctive clothing Jews were forced to wear, the distinctiveness of the Jew's oral culture is highlighted and magnified within the text, sometimes as a synecdoche of his moral degeneracy and frequently as a signifier of his outsider status. While performance may alter or invigorate other aspects of the character of Shylock, the text itself incorporates a Jew-voice that is intrinsic to the drama.
It has been argued by Fred Moten that the Othello created by Shakespeare is a blackface role, constituting a white fantasy of Blackness; a fantasy that has assumed a malevolent cultural power: ‘it's not so much that Shakespeare has given an early articulation of the Negro Problem; it's that, instead, he has given Negroes a problem’. 3 Similarly invidious is the cultural power of Shylock, and it is fundamentally a Jewface role that has indeed created a problem for Jews. In other words, The Merchant of Venice participates in a web of anti-Jewish discourse, and to some degree has invigorated that discourse. As Emma Smith points out: ‘It is Shakespeare's later play that has established for us as inevitable the relation between Venice and Jewish moneylenders, and there is no reason to suppose that this association predates The Merchant of Venice’. 4 In creating the vibrant character of Shylock, who is headlined on the quarto cover: ‘with the extreme cruelty of Shylock the Jew towards the said merchant in cutting a just pound of his flesh’, 5 Shakespeare created an icon for anti-Semitic rhetoric whose profoundly negative depiction of the Jew has reverberated through history as a trope in the rhetoric of anti-Semitism, a rhetoric which is – as I write this – resurgent and deadly. As traced in John Gross's Shylock: A Legend and Its Legacy, Shylock rambles through history as a locus for anti-Jewish rhetoric, already evoked in popular ballads in 1663. 6 He is still present in popular culture, such as the recent television show Suits (2011–2019), for which Merchant is an intertext that reifies anti-Jewish stereotypes through a Shylock-like character – who actually performs Shylock in an amateur stage production midway through the series.
Most notorious is the issue of performances in Nazi Germany. While the extent to which the drama was used for propaganda purposes by the Third Reich has been contested, Anselm Heinrich stresses the significance of ‘high-profile and influential anti-Semitic productions’. 7 Nevertheless, overall performances did decline because this play did not easily make itself available as a purely anti-Semitic enterprise, requiring specific instructions to the actors to prevent them from portraying Shakespeare in what Shakespeare Jahrbuch at the time referred to as ‘apologetic’ fashion. 8
If the play could be co-opted to promote racial and religious hatred, the extreme opposite is also true: the play can be used to teach tolerance of all kinds. At the same time, Shylock's ethno-religiosity is itself an artificial construction that hyperbolises a Christian fantasy of Judaism and Jews. Perhaps this is the reason for the exuberance with which so many theatre practitioners and literary scholars have posited that The Merchant of Venice is not about Jews. Patrick Stewart has referred to Shylock's Jewishness as ‘a distraction’, elaborating that, ‘to concentrate on Jewishness is to avoid the great potential in the character which is his universality’. 9 Jonathan Elukin asserts that Shylock symbolises the devil, 10 a position taken by other scholars as well, while Stephen Orgel claims the Jews in the play function as a stand-in for Puritans, 11 and Lee Oser focuses on Shylock's ‘Christian scepticism’. 12 Emma Smith, although she attempts at the end of her essay to step back from the notion of exchanging ‘Shylock-as-Jew’ with ‘Shylock-as-immigrant’, 13 argues that Shylock represents the Huguenot immigrants who flooded London in Shakespeare's time. The plethora of such theories, their very multiplication, is an acknowledgment of the empty space under the Jewface, a cultural absence waiting to be filled.
Nevertheless, while the play certainly centralises the discourse of intolerance, some critics have argued that the play ironically undermines that discourse; that as galling as the Jewface may be, as stereotypical and artificial the construction of Shylock's Jewishness, there is more going on here than just Jew hatred. As Martin Orkin points out, while play's language includes ‘darker hauntings or returns of a once medieval, clearly still vital, anti-Semitic tradition’, 14 at the same time, ‘the play's hosting of the stranger Shylock – daemonic doppelgänger to be − is also periodically “haunted” by elements of decency’. 15 A similar kind of contradiction is articulated when Moten asks of Othello, ‘What does it mean to portray Othello when the beauty of the language of that role, or the depth of human feeling it bears, is still filtered through the protocols of blackface no matter who plays it?’ 16 The same is conversely true for Shylock; can we just dismiss the eloquence of the ‘hath not a Jew eyes’ speech because it is delivered through the mask of Jewface? This article will argue that thinking about rhetorical listening and identifications, and how they are created especially through sound, can help us to understand the complexities of the question itself and also why it has been so difficult to arrive at any kind of definitive answer. That is, because Shakespeare was writing for heterogeneous, multiple audiences, he created a complicated and contradictory set of identifications, which allows for layers of conflicting meaning, creating a space for the play to be enrolled in the propaganda of intolerance as well as its inverse.
Theories of rhetorical identification
Discussions of rhetorical identification often begin with the theories of Kenneth Burke, who in following the classical tradition, reads in Aristotle an attempt to establish the importance of common ground, which is created by identification within a social group: ‘You persuade a man only insofar as you can talk his language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea, identifying your ways with his’. 17 Burke defines this social group both in terms of external physical characteristics as well as in terms of ideologies. It is ideologies, however, that Burke goes on to emphasise in the creation of common ground: ‘you give the “signs” of such consubstantiality by deference to an audience's “opinions” […] True, the rhetorician may need to change the audience's opinion in one respect; but he can succeed only insofar as he yields to the audience's opinion in other respects’. 18 So while a general identification in terms of physical appearance, language, dialect, and sociolect is at play, this intersects with more specific parameters pertaining to ideologies. We are thus left with a notion of consubstantiality that is to some degree intrinsic: there are some aspects of physical appearance and language that are susceptible to change, but others that are immutable. At the same time, the rhetor can seek a convergence of opinion to create a common ideological ground.
However, recent scholarship in rhetoric suggests a more complex dynamic in the creation of identification, a dynamic that does not require common ground. Diana Fuss conceptualises identification as occurring against the backdrop of the external: ‘identification is the detour through the other that defines a self’. 19 According to Fuss, we define ourselves by comparison and contrast to others, measuring the internal against the external, measuring the self against the other. Citing Judith Butler, Fuss then elaborates the theory by suggesting that entailed in identification is disidentification, that is, a refusal of identification. Disidentification is thus a disavowal, an ‘identification that one fears to make only because one has already made it …’. 20
In Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness, Krista Ratcliffe takes the concept of identification one step further, theorising non-identification as a method for accommodating situations where there is no common ground or perhaps where common ground is not sought. Rather, Ratcliffe foregrounds the possibilities of juxtaposing difference as a place of rhetorical listening: To define non-identification, I look first to its visual representation. The hyphen in non-identification signifies a place where two concepts are metonymically juxtaposed – that is, where concepts of the negative and of identification are associated but not overlapping. As such, the hyphen represents the ‘margin between,’ a place wherein people may consciously choose to position themselves to listen rhetorically. This ‘margin between’ does not transcend ideology; it does, however, provide a place of pause, a place of reflection, a place that invites people to admit that gaps exist.
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While metaphor is based on commonality, metonymy highlights difference, so Ratcliffe engages with identification metonymically, allowing multiple stories to exist side-by-side, making room for difference without hindering identification. In thinking this way about identification, Ratcliffe creates a space for listening to difference – an enterprise that she expands upon in Rhetorical Listening in Action, where she and Kyle Jensen further explore the ramifications of cultural logics. 22 Figuring identification metonymically and considering cultural logics enables us to productively conceptualise identification in Shakespeare's dramas.
Literalising and instantiating the notion of rhetorical listening, sound is an important component in the building of identifications, and thus the aural is central to our cultural construction of whiteness. In The Sonic Color Line, Jennifer Stoever establishes the connection between sound and our cultural constructions of race, and how the aural contributes to the obstinate and ubiquitous presence of racism. Stoever positions sound as ‘a critical modality through which subjects (re)produce, apprehend, and resist imposed racial identities and structures of racist violence’. 23 While the visual tropes of race are certainly important, sound and the aural are also central to our apprehension of racial difference – difference that in this text is compounded by religious difference and the resulting intolerance. This analysis will consider how a circle of whiteness is inscribed through sound, which delimits the boundaries of racial and religious difference in the text.
The Merchant and the Jew: first meetings
In order to understand Shylock, we need to begin with his primary antagonist, arguably his doppelganger and foil, Antonio. The play opens by building strong identifications between Antonio and the audience and centralising Antonio's role as the protagonist at the apex of the circle of whiteness delimited in the drama. Speaking to his friends, Antonio opens the play with a kind of interior weather forecast: In sooth I know not why I am so sad. It wearies me, you say it wearies you. But how I caught it, found it, or came by it, What stuff ’tis made of, whereof it is born, I am to learn. And such a want-wit sadness makes of me That I have much ado to know myself. (1.1.1–6)
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Despite his apparent self-fashioning prosperity, all is not right with Antonio, who seems to be suffering from a formless sort of depression. Although he denies that these are the sources of his melancholy, it transpires that his income is at risk, ‘tossing on the ocean’ (1.1.7), and that he either has no romantic relationship or an unarticulated, hopeless homosexual infatuation with Bassanio. 25 It is hard to imagine two more universal sources of anxiety, and Antonio's very repudiation of them perversely seems to give them strength, his denials a case of protesting too much. Although one hesitates to invoke universalist notions of Shakespeare, which too often elide gendered, racial, religious, and socio-economic difference, in this character there inheres a broad base for identifications: who in the audience would have never experienced either financial anxiety or romantic troubles? If there are any universals to the human condition, money troubles and the ‘pangs of despised love’ would be prime candidates, with depression itself not far behind.
Antonio thus becomes a kind of palimpsest on which the audience may read themselves and find consubstantiality. In contrast to the Jewish and other racialised Others in the drama, Antonio embodies what Christine Varnado refers to as ‘protagonistic whiteness’, 26 the whiteness that yields racial invisibility while conferring the possibility for identification that inheres in the role of protagonist. Antonio seems almost aware of his audience and his function as a protagonist to create identification with them as he self-consciously tells Salarino and Solanio, ‘It wearies me, you say it wearies you’ (1.1.2). This consciousness of audience is reinforced by his reference to theatrum mundi later on in the scene and his invitation to the audience to identify with him as an actor: ‘I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano, / A stage where every man must play a part, / And mine a sad one’ (1.1.81–3). Indeed, his part will be sad, and even at the end, when the comedic marriages provide a ‘happy’ resolution, he will be left hanging like a stray thread, continuing to play the sad part articulated in this metatheatrical moment, more observer than participant. He never quite fits into the warp and weft of Venetian society, but of course we too – whether we figure ‘we’ as the sixteenth-century London audience or the twenty-first century audience member or scholarly reader – also do not quite belong here.
Although all this would seem to foster identification, for some, identification with the protagonist may be hindered by Antonio's moneyed status and perhaps by his enjoyment of cultural hegemony. Moreover, although critics have viewed Antonio as a Shakespearean ideal, a more complex characterisation evolves because there is simultaneously something repellent in the way that he theatrically exults in his suffering. The bond is of course something that he takes upon himself, fully aware of the peril of putting himself at the mercy of his enemy as well as later on when his life is at stake and he hardly bothers to plead with Shylock. But even here, where his low spirits lack a compelling cause, as Harry Berger observes, ‘we begin to sense Antonio's fondness for the pleasures of victimization’. 27 Being sad and depressed renders him the centre of attention, a cynosure for identification, in the same way that throwing himself on the grenade of Shylock's predatory loan does, and he relishes his own suffering in a way that may complicate that identification. If Antonio is self-fashioned, as Arthur Little argues is often the case in Shakespeare's work: ‘It's white people – the whiteness of white people – who are being fashioned’. 28 In this case, Antonio enacts a self-fashioning, a constitutive identity that revels in a Christ-like suffering that contrasts with biblically resonant Jewish perfidy – a histrionic stance that may be tentatively read as limiting identification.
If when we first meet Antonio, we are invited to identify with him both sonically and on the basis of common ground – a common ground that is then vexed by his immersion in his own misery – precisely the opposite happens when we meet Shylock. The initial moments of the encounter between the audience and Shylock seem to promote disidentification, which is enabled and emphasised by the aural dimension of his discourse. As readers, our first indication of this would be the fact that initially Shylock is not named in the speech prefixes of the First Folio, but merely labelled ‘Iew’, a term that highlights difference while depersonalising the character. Perhaps the use of this term functioned as an indicator to the company to emphasise Shylock's incongruity as a Jew. Certainly, in the absence for centuries of any substantial and visible community of affiliated Jews in England, 29 the Jew represents what John Russell Brown has called a ‘fabulous and monstrous bogey belonging to remote times and places’, 30 a kind of Grendel walking the streets of a modern city.
From his first moment on the stage, Shylock's difference is also articulated aurally in his discourse. The prose cadences of his speech are a sign of his religious and cultural identity – an identity at odds with the ethos of the protagonist and his entourage: Shylock. Three thousand ducats, well. Bassanio. Ay, sir, for three months. Shylock. For three months, well. Bassanio. For the which, as I told you, Antonio shall be bound. Shylock. Antonio shall become bound, well. Bassanio. May you stead me? Will you pleasure me? Shall I know your answer? Shylock. Three thousand ducats for three months, and Antonio bound. Bassanio. Your answer to that? Shylock. Antonio is a good man. Bassanio. Have you heard any imputation to the contrary? Shylock. Ho, no, no, no, no! My meaning in saying he is a good man is to have you understand me that he is sufficient […] (1.3.1–17)
In keeping with his alienation from the Christian world, the Jew's linguistic style is initially unintelligible to Bassanio, as when Shylock refers to Antonio as a ‘good’ man and then has to explain that to him goodness refers to financial robustness – a signification that points to Shylock's moral degeneracy and an association between Jews and avariciousness that evokes the moneylenders in the Temple. Even more fundamentally, the sheer number of his repetitions highlights his aural otherness, rendering his discourse opaque. Do the repetitions indicate astonishment or disbelief: is he considering where to obtain the funds or gloating or scheming? His first words in this play, ‘three thousand ducats’ (1.3.1), and the repetitions of this phrase, make manifest his obsession with money, with later scenes serving to reinforce this initial impression as well as the stereotypical linkage between Jews and moneylending – a linkage that recent historical scholarship has discovered to be numerically and evidentially inaccurate. 31 As Emma Smith has observed, the association between Jews and moneylending was established by this drama, 32 and as this article argues, by a character in Jewface.
As the scene continues, Shylock's language becomes more and more redolent of what Leeds Barroll used to call poetry, accent on the last syllable. His speech tends to fall into rhythms and patterns that suggest poetry while delivering something more banal. For example, he uses epistrophe, rhyme, and parison in his over-detailed assertion that ‘there be land rats, and water rats, water thieves, and land thieves – I mean pirates’ (1.3.22–4). This inundation of poetic language in such a pragmatic sentence signals an unpleasant peculiarity; someone who is going overboard to please and to fit in, and is instead merely highlighting his own difference. He repeats the number three again and again – ‘three thousand ducats’, ‘three months’ – in a manner that falls strangely on the ear and constructs linguistic pairings that are rather too neat and fall flat: ‘This was a way to thrive, and he was blest; / And thrift is blessing if men steal it not’ (1.3.97–8). Shylock is trying too hard, which may defer identification or, conversely, invite it for its pathos.
From later references to his ‘Jewish gabardine’ it is apparent that his clothing also visually demonstrates Otherness, as does his preoccupation with lucre, but his difference is also consistently evoked at the sonic level. That is, this initial visual estrangement is magnified by Shylock's aural evocation of religious difference. When Bassanio invites Shylock to dine, Shylock's response is an explicit disidentification: Yes, to smell pork! To eat of the habitation which your prophet the Nazarite conjured the devil into! I will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, walk with you, and so following; but I will not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray with you. (1.3.33–8)
Particularly notable in this speech is the aural resonance of the language: an inundation of parison and epistrophe renders these words striking and memorable. This resonance highlights Shylock's hypocrisy as his later willingness to attend Antonio's dinner points towards the shallowness of this abjuration of Christian companionship and indicates his deeply felt but sublimated desire to belong to what Susan Oldrieve calls the ‘Old Boy Network’ of Venice. 35 It also emphasises his deceptiveness as his earlier protestations of religious belief, reinforced by his long biblical exegesis, are shown to be empty rhetorical flourishes. Of course, Shylock's outsider status is reified, and his hesitation is justified, when his later invitation to dine with Antonio turns out to be a subterfuge to enable Jessica to elope. While Shylock turns out to be the deceived, rather than the deceiver in this scenario, his speech patterns suggest the opposite, undermining any moral authority that might result from his victimisation and a resultant identification predicated upon empathy.
What is particularly noteworthy in this speech is that Shylock performs the giddying move of justifying a Jewish religious practice by citing Christian scripture – a move that would only be made by a character in Jewface. Even so, the strangeness of his aural expression defamiliarises it, creating an acoustic otherness that alienates Christian scripture and ‘Judaises’ it by interpreting it with Talmudic convolution. Perhaps somewhat anachronistically, Shylock is sufficiently familiar with Matthew to know the story of Jesus's exorcism of the devil from the dumb man into the herd of swine. Indeed, as Smith has observed, the biblical references in this drama mostly originate in the New Testament. 36 However, Shylock's citation of this Christian story defamiliarises it, implying that, as Drakakis has observed: ‘they literally ingest the devil each time they eat pork’. 37 This interpretation is a gesture that invokes the familiar only to alienate it; a gesture that he continues by calling Antonio a ‘fawning publican’ – publican representing a term from the Christian rather than the Jewish Bible – only a few lines later (1.3.41). In a lengthy aside, Shylock outlines his nefarious intentions; then, to justify the taking of interest, Shylock engages in a long textual analysis of the story of Laban and Jacob and the sheep – a story that he reinterprets contrary to both Jewish and Christian tradition an ironic strategy given that this act mimics the same move as performed by Christian theologians in regard to Jewish texts. If the Christian Bible typologically reinterprets the Jewish Bible, then Shylock's subsequent act of reinterpretation of both suggests heresy – complex and counterintuitive, perhaps mimicking Talmudic discourse. Unsurprisingly, Antonio casts this strategy as inherently evil, with Shylock as a ‘devil’ who ‘can cite Scripture for his purpose!’ (1.3.106). Perhaps though, this type of reinterpretation evokes the Protestant emphasis on the biblical text, the principle of sola scriptura, and the subsequent alternate interpretations put forward by Protestants. This turn to the biblical may thus invite either identification or disidentification.
Only a few lines later, the rhetorical efficacy of Antonio's denunciations is undercut when Shylock demonstrates the hypocrisy of Antonio's moralising: Antonio has often ‘rated’ Shylock for usury, only to himself engage in such a transaction; he has abused Shylock physically and verbally, only to come to him for help. Antonio's vehemence is revealed as hollow; his importunity to Shylock hypocritical; his bullying behaviour to Shylock childishly offensive. Antonio practices a kind of ‘moral usury’ because the debts that he invokes can never be paid back;
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his beneficiaries will owe him a moral debt forever. While Shylock's speech patterns are characteristically repetitive, again and again in the speech, Antonio's hypocrisy is brought home: You, that did void your rheum upon my beard, And foot me as you spurn a stranger cur Over your threshold. Moneys is your suit. What should I say to you? Should I not say ‘Hath a dog money? Is it possible A cur can lend three thousand ducats?’ (1.3.127–32)
However, Shylock's accusations – and the resultant potential for the development of audience identifications – are undercut acoustically by the tone in which they are rendered. That is, in contrast to other characters whose questions are generally real, Shylock structures his arguments as a series of rhetorical questions: ‘Hath a dog money? Is it possible / A cur can lend three thousand ducats?’ (3.1.131–2); and ‘If he should break his day, what should I gain / By the exaction of the forfeiture?’ (175–6). This figure will be repeated later and most memorably in Shylock's ‘Hath not a Jew eyes?’ speech. While Antonio (and other characters) may ask the occasional rhetorical question, in the case of Shylock it is a repeated aural pattern that characterises him, suggesting that language games and sophistry are at the core of his identity. Earlier, Shylock's strangeness and moral turpitude is underlined when he greets Antonio by observing that ‘[y]our Worship was the last man in our mouths’ (3.1.61) – an observation both linguistically peculiar and vaguely suggestive of cannibalism. Over and above the content of his words, aurally Shylock is rendered as alien – a tactic that may invite disidentification, or perhaps the reverse for those who themselves instantiate difference.
As far as Shylock is concerned, even in the act of introducing and crafting a character who at times invites disidentification, there are already chinks visible in this disidentification that will gape wider as the play continues. This scene makes his malignancy clear, but it simultaneously casts his motivations in a sympathetic light by revealing that he has been subjected to hateful behaviour and deeply ingrained prejudice. Another such gap is Shylock's name itself, whose origins are not readily apparent, leading various scholarly theories about its etymology. Gordon McMullan, for example, cites Israel Gollancz who associates the name with a pseudo-Josephus-authored historical account that refers to a ‘Schiloch the Babylonian’ who fights a Roman captain ‘Antonius’, claiming that the name represents a mistaken confutation with the Hebrew ‘shalach’, cormorant, a symbol of usury. 39 This possibility is an interesting one, but certainly if the allusion were purposeful, Shakespeare could not have expected that many in the audience would recognise it. In contrast, Stephen Orgel has established that Shylock is ‘clearly and unambiguously’ an English name. 40 Indeed, it is – strikingly – the only English (or typically English-sounding) name in the text as most of the other names in the drama are Italian (or Italianate), and so this piece of onomastic nationalism again opens a slender door to identification at its most basic level. The sounds of the language and its rhythm, tones, and articulation find expression in that essential unit of identification – the name – and it is in this component where Shylock alone projects a sonic Englishness and an auditory echo.
At the same time, Shylock's backstory is marked by lacunae. We know that Antonio has attacked him, but we do not know why; the story is only rendered in its bare outlines. Later on, we are told that Shylock had a wife for whom he felt deeply, yet no further details are provided. After his defeat in the fourth act, we are told little of what happens to him or how he lives. These fascinating gaps in the text – shadows of stories never told – may function as spaces to be filled in by the audience, perhaps with their own sad stories or defeats, establishing common ground with a character who may otherwise seem ineluctably alien.
Shylock in mourning
The other side of sound is silence, as Cheryl Glenn explains in Unspoken: A Rhetoric of Silence. She explores on the one hand, the ways silence functions as exclusion, but on the other hand, ‘the ways silence can be as powerful as speech, the ways that silence and silencing deliver meaning’.
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Shylock's silence after his daughter's elopement is a lacuna that delivers meaning eloquently and historically; it is through this gap in the text that directors have sometimes created a Shylock whose character militates against his demonisation. In the Radford film, one of the hardest moments to watch is Shylock's wordless cries of despair upon discovering his daughter missing; this inserted scene by Radford follows the tradition begun by Henry Irving, who had Shylock return home to an empty house – a staging later followed by Herbert Beerbohm-Tree's 1908 Merchant. In contrast, in the text itself, Solanio and Salarino mockingly recount the father's reaction: I never heard a passion so confused, So strange, outrageous, and so variable As the dog Jew did utter in the streets. ‘My daughter, O my ducats, O my daughter! Fled with a Christian! O my Christian ducats! Justice, the law, my ducats, and my daughter, A sealèd bag, two sealèd bags of ducats, Of double ducats, stol’n from me by my daughter, And jewels – two stones, two rich and precious stones – Stol’n by my daughter! Justice! Find the girl! She hath the stones upon her, and the ducats.’ (2.8.12–23)
In contrast to this caricaturised repetitive language, when Shylock speaks with his daughter in their private home prior to leaving for Antonio's house, his language is marked by the antithetical characteristic: taciturnity. While his servant babbles, Shylock is sparing in his speech – an aspect epitomised by his pithy ‘drones hive not with me’ (2.5.49). Shylock does repeatedly remark upon his reluctance to leave the house (which heightens the dramatic tension), but varies the wording and thereby avoids the linguistic repetitiveness that otherwise characterises his speech. His lengthy aside in his first scene displays a similar economy of expression. His laconic speech within his house and within himself is thus sonically constituted as opposite from his public speech, a difference that is highlighted by Lancelet's babbling. Emphasising the succinctness of his language, Shylock ends his contribution to the scene by suggesting that his thrifty speech reflects his values: ‘“Fast bind, fast find”— / A proverb never stale in thrifty mind’ (2.5.55–6). If so, his usual verbal repetitions perhaps suggest a characteristic lack of authenticity and candour in dialogue with non-family. This difference in speech pattern may function as further confirmation of Shylock's perfidy or alternatively may suggest the stress under which he functions as an outsider in Venice.
Solanio and Salarino's ridicule in the face of Shylock's tragic silence also speaks to Shylock's victimisation, and his silence offers a painful dignity in the face of this mockery. The audience can choose to identify with Solanio and Salarino's jeering and laugh with them; comedy certainly creates powerful identifications. But the audience has an alternative: that is, to view this mockery as the bullying that it is. Here is a man who is suffering because of actions in which Solanio and Salarino have been complicit (as is, in some sense, the audience): the absconding of his daughter and her burglary of the house. That they should display scorn for their victim seems egregious, his silence that of the marginalised underdog. Indeed, the cool derision served up by these characters, which contrasts with Shylock's silent pain, could be construed as part of the general moral turpitude and corruption that inheres in English conceptualisations of Venice.
Again and again, these characters seem focused on lightheartedness and mockery in the face of difficulties, rather than on positive action that might rectify problems. Everything they experience is vicarious, nothing real; their jokes an empty noise in the face of a father's unarticulated pain. Thus, at the end of the same scene, when they discuss the bad news about Antonio's shipping ventures and Antonio's melancholy due to Bassanio's absence, their proposed solution is to ‘quicken his embraced heaviness / with some delight or other’ (2.8.54–5). Instead of performing compensatory actions in the real world, these characters see themselves as exclusively taxed with performing the functions of a clown: cheering Antonio while doing nothing to actually help. They are comic characters, but when juxtaposed with the tragic entanglements in which they are involved, the comedy seems empty, sour, and narcissistic. There is something parasitical about them, redolent of English notions of the corruptions of Catholicism and the fleshpots of Venice. So rather than fostering a clear identification with the jokesters, the depravity of these friends of Antonio may potentially complicate that identification or reverse it altogether, creating the beginnings of sympathy for the bereft Shylock, whose silence and absence here lend him ethical weight.
Potential sympathy for Shylock of course finds its apotheosis in the ‘Hath not a Jew eyes’ monologue, the hot emotion of that speech standing in stark contrast to the cool anti-Semitic mockery with which Solanio and Salarino taunt him. The profusion of rhetorical questions marks Shylock's difference at the level of language and intonation: even if one did not have access to the meaning of this speech, the sound itself contrasts with the intonations of the speakers around him. Indeed, throughout the drama the prosody of his primarily non-verse speeches is juxtaposed with the dialogues conducted in the blank verse of the Venetians around him. Shylock persistently uses the interrogative mood in dialogue, characteristically employing questions where others would use statements, and asking questions to which he already knows the answer (1.3.54–5). Questioning is his default intonation, instantiating the tenuousness of his position. His very existence as a Jew in Christian Venice – emblemised by his fragile status as an alien – is questionable, and his use of the interrogative mood underscores that.
That auditory difference underlines the fact that these groups operate under different cultural logics. In Rhetorical Listening in Action, we are abjured to ‘[r]eflect on the cultural logics haunting the text’, 42 and it is in this speech that the competing cultural logics become clearly visible. To the Christian cultural logic that salvation is through Christ and that unbelievers are devilish, Shylock responds by invoking a common humanity, suggesting that there is no essentialising difference between Jews and Christians. Shylock's attempt to impose his egalitarian cultural logic on the hierarchical racist world of the play is of course doomed to fail because even the language in which it is couched highlights his estrangement from the world of Venice, contradicting the notion that equality or moral equivalence is possible in the world of the play. While the content of Shylock's speech argues for identification and common ground, the very intonation in which it is delivered conveys alienness and difference.
In the First Folio – without the neat punctuation and regularised editorial apparatus of modern editions – Shylock's words seem to tumble over each other, an auditory avalanche, the rebuttal of a thousand years of Christian prejudice and hatred. This coruscating anger fired at Christians may trigger disidentification, but the very fact that his passionate claim to being human is so relentlessly turned aside opens a possible space for sympathy and identification. Certainly, with Tubal remaining alone with Shylock, an opportunity is present for the development of a more sympathetic and identifiable depiction of a father's grief. However, that opportunity is largely undeveloped as Shylock dwells upon the financial aspects of his loss; Shylock's self-presentation is thus consistent with that of those who mock him. Yet, coming at the end of the scene, there is one important moment that humanises Shylock further, in reference to the ring that Jessica has exchanged for a monkey: ‘Out upon her! Thou torturest me, Tubal. It was my turquoise! I had it of Leah when I was a bachelor. I would not have given it for a wilderness of monkeys’ (3.1.119–22). In eloquently evoking Shylock's Leah, his real sense of loss for his dead wife juxtaposed with the wonderfully resonant ‘a wilderness of monkeys’, the play creates a new tone of sadness and regret for this character and may invite identification by recasting Shylock as a ‘struggling single parent who is trying to control his teenage daughter’, 43 while also allowing ‘the fleeting insight that Shylock was once a young man who loved and was loved in return’. 44 But these rich possibilities for establishing common ground are quickly sloughed off by a conversational turn to Antonio and by a proposed business meeting between Tubal and Shylock at a ‘synagogue’, mentioned twice – to Elizabethans the site of arcane rituals of an archaic religion, and a term sometimes associated with witchcraft and the biblical ‘synagogue of Satan’. In effect then, this statement functions as a re-estrangement of the character, conceptually linking the moneylender to the biblical Pharisees who conduct commerce on the Temple grounds, locking him out of the circle of Christian whiteness. Any movement in this scene towards identification seems to be turned aside, but these powerful moments are not entirely vitiated.
Thus, in examining the scene as a whole, what is created here is what Ratcliffe has called a non-identification. Instead of common ground, there is a juxtaposition of narratives. Shylock does not suddenly become a warm and fuzzy character, but the audience can understand his motivations; they can perceive his relationships. He is in this sense as fully realised as Antonio, and with a more normative character, that might invite identification. Certainly, for the audience to disidentify at this point would require a purposeful setting aside of the tragic circumstances of the moneylender's life: the loss of his wife followed by the loss of his daughter, who is not only absent from his life, but also religiously estranged and ‘damned for it’. Yet – lest we identify too far – Shakespeare never lets us forget Shylock's religion and ethnicity for a moment; his Jewishness is always front and centre, a difference underlined at the sonic level by these alien speech patterns. Kenneth Burke affirms that ‘[you] put identification and division ambiguously together, so that you cannot know for certain just where one ends and the other begins, and you have the characteristic invitation to rhetoric’.
45
This admixture of identification and division is precisely what makes Shylock such a potent and legendary character and leads to what Ratcliffe defines as non-identification: With an interdependent place of non-identification, X and Y are imagined not as subject and object but as two very different subjects – that is, as subjects who are juxtaposed but not necessarily on common ground, as subjects who are encountering the same socialising discourses but processing them very differently, as subjects whose juxtaposition presupposes an interdependency upon one another that is integral to the identity formation of each.
46
Shylock's story is juxtaposed with the other stories in the drama in a way that metonymically highlights difference, sometimes in caricaturised Jewface. The possibilities for identification are there, but non-identifications seem more likely as Shylock is the exotic, mysterious Other whose differences are immutable, but whose story can perhaps be allowed to lie side-by-side with Christian stories.
The jailer scene
The trial scene is of course pivotal to the play, so much so that historically many productions have ended with that scene. Right before that scene, however, there is a short interval where Antonio's jailer takes him to the moneylender to plead for mercy but Shylock refuses to listen, while conversely Antonio refuses to acknowledge the cruelty of his behaviour towards Shylock – a scene that emphasises these characters’ inability to truly hear, much less identify with, each other. Creating dramatic tension, this scene is particularly interesting for its refusal to mention the motivation that had just been established in the previous Venetian scenes, where the Jewish characters emphasised Antonio's complicity in the stealing away of Jessica and the breakdown of Shylock's household. Antonio however refuses to take responsibility for the actions that have led him to this pass, referring neither to the unspoken Jessica nor to his anti-Semitic bullying, but focusing on his beneficent help to his fellow Christians: He seeks my life. His reason well I know: I oft delivered from his forfeitures Many that have at times made moan to me. Therefore he hates me. (3.3.23–6)
If we can imagine a drama where our protagonist apologises to Shylock for his bad actions in the past and for his complicity in Jessica's escape, then Antonio's request for mercy might have a chance. His failure to apologise suggests that the performance of begging for mercy is just that – a fictive, theatrical performance, an empty gesture. Certainly, at the sonic level, Antonio's brisk imperatives in the first scene with Shylock are transformed to a much weaker, half-hearted pleading; Antonio is perversely wallowing in his victimhood, not making a real effort to escape. As part of a constellation of derogatory actions aimed at Shylock, Antonio does not even alter his use of the second person familiar (although Shylock has begun to use it to address Antonio). While he is able to bring himself to address his adversary as ‘good Shylock’, he is unable to go as far as to treat him with the respect implied by the formal ‘you’. Shylock similarly reverts to the repetitive speech patterns of his first scene with Antonio, repeating the word ‘bond’ no less than six times in 16 lines of dialogue. Neither one of these characters is willing or able to bridge differences to establish common ground or to respectfully non-identify. They are equally obdurate and equally deaf, speaking past each other. When the Duke at the beginning of the trial scene describes Shylock as a ‘stony adversary’, he could really be talking about either the merchant or the Jew.
The trial scene
The fact that Shylock is an outsider – and thus at a disadvantage – is made obvious from the beginning, both visually and sonically. In short scene with the jailer, Shylock already points out the preferential treatment Antonio receives: ‘I do wonder, / Thou naughty jailer, that thou art so fond / To come abroad with him at his request’ (3.3.8–10). This preferential treatment is emphasised visually at the opening of the trial scene, when the mere fact that the Duke and Antonio engage in dialogue prior to the trial and Shylock's entrance suggests that the Duke favours his interlocuter. Certainly, when the Duke and Antonio converse in the courtroom before calling in Shylock, and the Duke explicitly affirms ‘I am sorry for thee’, going on to describe Shylock as an ‘inhumane wretch’ (4.1.3–4), we are being informed that the Duke identifies with Antonio and is on his side. This ‘blatant bias’ reaffirms Shylock's status an antagonist, not merely of the merchant, but of everyone in the room. 47 As Christine Varnado has argued, Shylock's claim is consonant with early modern notions of debt collection, in which the human body was used as collateral. In insisting on the pursuit of justice within the legal framework Christian Venice, Shylock is perhaps aspiring to whiteness, but ‘doing whiteness slightly wrong: his demand is a little too gory, a little too spectacular, a little too explicit and direct about the instrumentalisation of human life underlying the logic of debt’. 48 His struggle to be white, to belong, is itself what marks him as inescapably different and Other.
In his initial speech, the Duke begins by addressing Shylock by his name, but by the end of the speech, he is once more ‘Jew’, as he is in the speech prefixes for most of the scene; 49 and resonantly ‘Jew’ was a term that in the early modern period could be used as a generalised insult as well as a proper noun. Of course, after he is named as such by the Duke, his difference highlighted linguistically, the moneylender proceeds to further estrange both his onstage and offstage audience by speaking in a way that sonically marks him as Other. Again, he uses a preponderance of rhetorical questions, repeating key terms such as ‘bond’ frequently, and employing short exclamatory phrases. Some of these are orientalised in their phrasing, such as ‘O wise and upright judge’, a fawning turn of phrase that makes his alienness explicit. Apparent at the auditory level, Shylock's Jew-voice performance of difference resonates with stereotypes of the exoticised, insinuating, conniving Jew.
This sonic strangeness is compounded by Shylock's exotic semantic choices. He says that he has sworn ‘by our holy Sabbath’, a strange phrase as it falls on Christian ears, a phrase that throws religious difference into the faces of his audience and possibly evokes the witches’ Sabbat, gesturing toward something demonic by juxtaposing that phrase with the unholy desire for revenge, thereby suggesting something inherently evil about Judaism. He then goes on to threaten the city: ‘If you deny it, let the danger light / Upon your charter and your city's freedom!’ (4.1.39–40). In doing so, he sets himself up as the antagonist of Christian Venice as a whole. After removing himself so effectively from any possible sense of shared common ground or identification, he then proceeds to justify the logic of his claim through a convoluted and strange set of metaphors. While critics have done an excellent job of explicating the logic of this speech, one may hypothesise that the speech is deliberately constructed to be eccentric and outlandish to further isolate Shylock. As the moneylender stridently asserts to Bassanio: ‘I am not bound to please thee with my answers!’ (4.1.66); indeed, he seems to deliberately seek to displease. Repeatedly, both the Duke and Portia refer to the case as ‘strange’. Quentin Skinner believes that this term alludes to a rhetorical ‘causa admirabilis’ (a strange case), which as Cicero warns, is liable to alienate the audience. 50 Under normal circumstances, the rhetor would be expected to attempt to mitigate this estrangement by beginning with apologetics (insinuatio); but as we have seen, Shylock does precisely the opposite. 51
If anything in the aural language has failed to antagonise the audience against Shylock, then surely the sight of him standing and sharpening his knife to butcher another human being would. Conjured in the horror of this image are the medieval legends of ritual murder, to say nothing of ‘the occluded threat of circumcision’. 52 Indeed, throughout the drama, Shylock has alluded to cannibalism, as when he goes to Antonio's banquet ‘to feed upon / The prodigal Christian’ (2.5.15–16) – a cannibalism that symbolises the economic cannibalism of the usurer, while simultaneously suggesting Catholic ritual. 53 Many elements in this scene thus seem pointedly designed to create a marked disidentification between Shylock and the audience.
Perversely, though, it is Shylock's resulting isolation, marked at the aural level in the text of the play (and usually at the visual in performance), that opens a space for him to be considered with perhaps an iota of sympathy. Antonio is so obviously the object of sympathy here that his antagonist becomes so isolated and so obviously alone as to come out the other side. There are several other plays where we also have a protagonist who is isolated in a crowd, surrounded by others with whom he disidentifies: Hamlet, Timon, Coriolanus, Julius Caesar. Each of these eponymous characters at a pivotal moment finds himself alone in a hostile multitude: Hamlet, who but for Horatio is alone in a world where everyone has accepted the rule of his father's assassin; Timon surrounded by his erstwhile ‘friends’ whose true colours have been revealed; Coriolanus prey to the citizenry of the city he has saved; Caesar knifed by a mob of his compatriots. Shylock is similar in his isolation, surrounded by antagonists, alone in a Christian world that hates him for his religious belief, railing at that world.
He maintains a quixotic belief in the law, a conviction that blind justice will be on his side, but the emptiness of that belief is revealed when Portia explains that under Venetian law Jews are aliens and thus subject to harsher strictures.
Shylock's desire to believe that he is equal under the law is thus revealed to be hollow; Portia's valorisation of ‘mercy’ equally so. Regardless of how many generations his family may have resided in Venice, as a Jew he will always be an ‘alien’, a stranger in perpetuity since there was no land of which he could claim to be a native, as James Shapiro reminds us: ‘every Jew who stepped foot in England in the early late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries … was an alien’,
54
and throughout Europe Jews were consistently treated as aliens in their home countries. The fact that everyone is against him is highlighted by Gratiano's bullying torment, recurring throughout the scene, but particularly egregious at the moment of Shylock's defeat: Beg that thou mayst have leave to hang thyself! And yet, thy wealth being forfeit to the state, Thou hast not left the value of a cord; Therefore thou must be hanged at the state's charge. (4.1.379–83)
Even if the audience laughs at Gratiano's sallies, they may perhaps be embarrassed to do so – there is something sour and unpleasant about bullying a man who has been soundly defeated and excluded, marginalised and relentlessly humbled. In contrast to the raucousness of Gratiano's crowing, Shylock's silence speaks eloquently, his isolation and the thoroughness of his loss rendering possible an identification that would seem counterintuitive. As in the earlier scene, when Solario and Solanio made fun of the loss of his daughter, Shylock's silence is the badge and emblem of his victimisation, which is similarly emphasised by his absence in the fifth act. His characteristically raucous speech suppressed, Shylock's silence eloquently expresses his suffering. While his difference has perhaps been so enlarged upon as to make the affordance of common ground difficult, non-identification is a mode that has been made available.
What makes this play so interesting and so malleable is the fact that Shakespeare consistently complicates easy dichotomies and opens a space for his audience to hear Shylock's story even as their relationship to him may constitute a firm non-identification. More than just an evil usurer, the embodiment of all the bad qualities that the Christian Bible ascribes to Jews, he is also a suffering father and widower, a human being who feels things as Christians do. Simultaneously, any identification the audience may have with Antonio is complicated by his enjoyment of martyrdom, his prejudice and hatred toward the Other. Yet, Shylock's essential difference is consistently marked sonically, at a level that speaks directly to the emotion and hinders identification. Like a disputatio in utramque partem, the play simultaneously argues both sides of the case because its author has made possible a multiplicity of identifications, allowing Jewish and Christian stories to lie side by side, even while Shylock's cultural logics are obscured by his Jewface enactments of a putative Judaism.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Thank you to the anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
