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This chapter explores how an understanding of credit might be brought to bear on one of William Shakespeare's most misunderstood plays, The Merchant of Venice. The ‘pound of flesh’ bond story, has come, through its compelling portrayal of the Jew Shylock, to dominate the play. Shylock is the star part, and the play's treatment of Jews, anti-Jewish prejudice, and toleration is usually held up as its most significant feature, focusing critical attention on Shylock-related topics: usury and the law. Inspired by the onstage court scene, the play's longest, critics have interpreted Shylock's battle with Balthasar/Portia as relating to different legal systems, Shylock's contractual literalism versus Portia's merciful equity, a legal battle that is then mapped onto the play's pitting of (Jewish) usury versus (Christian) charity. In truth, the play presents a far more complex understanding of the interactions between finance and the law, and between various different monetary dealings of the early modern world.

Cues can be an integral constituent of characterization, and of no one is this truer than Shylock. This chapter explores not only how cue-effects contribute to the Shylock-part, but how cues can be the ‘plumbing’ of a play, at once visible and subterranean, directing the flow and determining the temperature. It shows that the repeated cue is used when the unstable genre of the play — tragedy, comedy, or something in between — is palpably up for grabs. Shylock and Mercutio embody this struggle; they alike scuff or straddle the supposed boundaries between comedy and tragedy.

This chapter looks at the ‘linear’ unfolding of some of the part-based techniques already identified, and sees how the character's story is progressively embodied in prosodic shifts and mutations. In particular, it considers the shifts into and out of rhyme, prose, and blank verse. These case studies are split into two sections. First, the chapter studies a series of romantic heroine parts, quite possibly written for and played by the same actor: Portia, Rosalind, Olivia, Helena (All's Well), and Isabella. Second, it examines three more or less ‘tragic’ male parts, in which both the character and the actor experience a growing loneliness, even alienation: Mercutio, Shylock, and Macbeth.

This chapter suggests that Shylock is Shakespeare and Shakespeare is Shylock. He is not only Antonio's double but Shakespeare's double, his brother and other, a piece of deep dissimulation joined with a startling kind of exposure. The idea edges toward the asymptote of impossibility. Shakespeare always reminds us that hearts are the most shadowy of things.

The author becomes munshi to the Bheel agent and is transferred to Lieutenant C.F. Hart. He describes his expedition to Nagar Parkar, comments on a Marátha horseman's impudence, the decision of the native magistrate, and the Egyptian version of the story of Shylock.

This chapter examines the criticism and foreigner bashing found on the pages of the Canard. This was mostly the result of the international connection of postwar economic difficulties, such as the decline of the franc and the problem of debts owed to the United States and Britain. The chapter shows that the Anglo-Saxons were more prone to the Canard's attacks. The first section studies the use of English tourists in caricature, while the second section presents a letter from a regular reader of the Canard, Jean Armand, who talked about stereotypes and the debts of France. This is followed by a discussion of “Uncle Shylock”.

In Harold Bloom's chapter in The Merchant of Venice in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, he claims that “the ontological weight of Shylock, from his first appearance through his last, places him as a representation of reality far distaining every other character in the play.” Although Shylock's affect also shifts from scene to scene, it does so in a narrower compass and more expressly motivated manner. Multivalency is imposed on Shylock in Radford's interpolated scenes, each of which supplies Shylock's single-mindedness with a context that both seeks to explain and forgive it. The film's mining of different genre conventions is even more apparent on the level of tone than it is on that of fashion or cosmetics, most notably in scenes that neither Jeremy Irons's Antonio nor Al Pacino's Shylock weigh down with their old-world gravitas.

This chapter investigates two representative examples of approaches to The Merchant of Venice that foreground in different ways the issue of irony. It first provides a broad sense of what reading with or without irony involves and how these approaches bear upon the issue of scepticism, on the one hand, and the ‘how to live’ question of literary humanism, on the other. Shylock is Shakespeare's prescient sign of the pervasiveness of market values, prescient because capitalism is of course now a global phenomenon whose effects on all aspects of human life are seemingly irresistible. It is concluded that the multiple ironies in the play mean that the human as a source of identification in the play keeps shifting about: from Belmont to Venice, from Christian to Jew back to Christian, from capitalism via the affectively charged culture of debt and credit to the play's anti-capitalist critique.

Defeated by Portia's law tricks and subject to the judgment of the Venetian court, Shylock is told that he must on pain of death become a Christian. This chapter argues the demand for conversion has in it the inventiveness of a cynical malice. It is the last twist of the knife in the staged humiliation of this Jew, one that tries to outmatch the Jew's humiliation of the merchant. By just so obviously not having any inward force, the idea of conversion reminds us of the more intractable spaces of mind and imagination the play has opened up in Shylock, even as it seems like an attempt to shut them down, or simply make them irrelevant.

This chapter examines two more fully developed fictions of Shylock's afterlife to help clarify what is at stake when we reimagine such a creature. One of the most elaborate attempts to lend Shylock a life that continues beyond the confines of the play is the 1931 novel The Last Days of Shylock, written by Ludwig Lewisohn—a prolific but now mostly forgotten American novelist, scholar, and man of letters. Heinrich Heine also finds a later history and voice for Shylock that is the more sharply true for keeping him closer to home. The exiled poet gives us a Shylock who has never left Venice, surviving there to the writer's own time in a ghostly fashion.

This chapter analyzes the migration of “Enough,” from the 1570 play Enough Is as Good as a Feast, from its place in Elizabethan drama to its lodging in the figure of Shylock (Shakespeare's stage). Shylock is a Jewish money lender whose profession and religion were among the period's preeminent symbols of excess, the ever-increasing “overplus” associated with illicit commerce and the general acceleration of early modern England's domestic and international economies. This acceleration, and the kinds of financial instruments and ideologies it involved, is inextricable from the complicated intersection of economic practices and Reformation religious beliefs. The chapter identifies a certain moment in the history of satisfaction, a moment when the ethical and affective values assigned to satis by the strong voices of economic morality stood in striking contrast to the values associated with penitential enough.

This chapter introduces a new way of thinking about the anti-mimetic role that affective point-of-view played in early modern English theatrical performance. Works of drama written in this period cannot be fully understood outside of the context of their performance (I return to this claim in chapter three). The affective embodiments of characters that were enacted on stage were both transactional and intersubjective in their relation to the audience; this kind of theater was able, as a result, to serve as a kind of laboratory where the faultlines of affect that ran through the audience could be tested, explored, and felt. Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy employed the affective architectonics of the new amphitheater playhouses to cast a shadow of dramatic irony over that audience. Marlowe and Shakespeare built upon Kyd’s theatrical practices in their own plays, specifically in Edward II, Titus Andronicus, and The Merchant of Venice. Such plays develop a transactional relation to their audiences that relies on a kind of “affective irony,” in which the audience’s emotional reactions and ideological points-of-view are catalyzed only insofar as they are alienated from—rather than represented by—the emotions expressed onstage.

This chapter explores Shylock's incoherent grief in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, where Shylock's defeat seems to have been insufficiently expressed. His penultimate words, “I am content” (4.1.391), are perceived to be spiritually disabled, without recognizable emotion or comprehension, not even angry or contemptuous. How might this moment be accurately and plausibly played? How does one quickly move from an endlessly expressed murderousness to a virtually immediate acceptance of an interpretation of the law? Thus, the chapter speaks of the right to speak, noting the instances the word say occurs in the play as well as questioning the reasons why Shakespeare's trial-like exchanges are often conversations between Christians and Jews. It takes up the question of whether the play is anti-Semitic or whether it is about the experience of one's being anti-Semitic.

In The Merchant of Venice, the trial scene of Shylock v Antonio offers a glimpse of the possible discussion on the legal issues in the play—a discussion that is addressed in this chapter. The chapter discusses the trial first from a technical standpoint, moves onto a broader discussion on the general social themes involving equity, jurisprudence, and capitalism. It examines how Shylock's trial fares through a technical standpoint, where it is derived that because Shylock did not violate the attempted-murder statute, his property is not forfeit. He is not, however, entitled to the return of the three thousand ducats that he had lent Bassanio. Finally, the chapter also discusses the distinction between “law” and “equity,” and the spirit of equity in The Merchant of Venice.