Shylock: A Legend and Its Legacy.

Shylock: A Legend and Its Legacy, by John Gross (Simon & Schuster, 386 pp., $25)

JUST after the Second World War Hannah Arendt wrote: "The theatrical quality of the political world had become so patent that the theater could appear as the realm of reality." She was referring to the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, but John Gross's very interesting book is proof positive that the condition has not gone away. If anything, it has intensifted. The bulk of this volume depends for its effect on an amazing and stubborn confusion in which a theatrical character invades real life.

Shylock purports to be the history of "a legend and its legacy." Certainly Shylock himself did not begin as a legend. He was a clear-cut central character in Shakespeare's comedy The Merchant of Venice. As Gross himself says near the end of his book, this dramatis persona is a villain who attempts to commit legalized murder. The "legendary" connection arose from the fact that Shylock is also a Jew. Because he is a very unpleasant Jew (though not as nasty as some other theatrical Jews of the period, such as Marlowe's Barabbas), and because strong characters in the best plays almost always have a touch of the archetype about them, Shylock broaches the complex of sentiments aroused by anti-Semitism and has, in that context, developed into a kind of legend. What Gross has done is to chronicle a strand of that transformation.

It is an odd and bumpy story, with a number of peculiar problems. The most obvious of these is the confusion described by Hannah Arendt, which sometimes affects Gross himself, when he treats Shylock as though he were not a fiction. One wonders at the sanity of those who have written serious "legal studies" of the trial in the play. The tendency to regard Shylock as an actual person of influence in the real world seems (according to Gross) to have begun with Shakespeare himself. The famous "Hath not a Jew eyes?" speech is presented as a turning point in the history of the stereotypically malevolent Jew, moving toward the Jew as a human being.

Speaking as a dramatist, I doubt that the speech had any such purpose. Quite the contrary. Shakespeare did not live in a time like ours, when serious writers for the theater are expected to provide both text and, so to speak, a pedagogic or agitprop gloss. There is a perfectly good dramatic explanation for the "Hath not" speech which Gross never considers. Shylock, a social and religious outsider, and hostile to his society, suddenly advances a number of physical and emotional characteristics that he has in common with his gentile audience. Few if any Elizabethan spectators would have felt such a kinship, and none of them were encumbered with our guilt feelings about spurning minority groups. The effect of the speech would thus very likely have been a neat theatrical frisson of rejection and horror, evoked for its own sake, out of sheer dramatic, as opposed to humanitarian, instinct. This may not jibe with the critical image of Shakespeare as the great-hearted poet; but it is less grotesque than the perverse interpretations of subsequent centuries which blatantly confuse the stage with documentary real life, and project anachronistic motives, ideas, and feelings into Shakespeare's mind. What the speech certainly seems to have done is give later generations a fulcrum for turning the play on its head.

In Gross's account, these attempts begin around 1709, when a critic, Nicholas Rowe, rounded the tradition of speculating over Shylock as a tragic figure instead of a villain. This idea was first taken onto the stage by the eighteenth-century actor Charles Macklin. In 1790 a clergyman, Richard Hole, wrote "An Apology for Shylock," giving persecution and suffering as an excuse for his bad behavior. In 1814 the actor Edmund Kean discarded Shylock's traditional comic red wig and made him dark, dignified, and tragic. Three years later the critic Hazlitt noted the increasing tendency for Shylock to be portrayed sympathetically, and suggested that he had "more ideas than any other person in the piece." At the same time Hazlitt denigrated Portia and sneered at the "quality of mercy" speech, saying that there were "a thousand finer ones in Shakespeare."

By 1838 Shakespeare's play had been tipped completely upside down by liberal critics, with Shylock as a tragic hero and Antonio as a "persecutor." From then on theatrical presentations of Shylock seesawed back and forth between Shakespeare's villain and the critics' heroic victim. Occasionally an eccentric opinion would turn up, as when William Cullen Bryant asserted that "Shylock is not a Jew."

Now and then a gleam of common sense broke through this murk. While Sir Henry Irving was playing a nobly suffering Shylock, the critic James Spedding remarked that Shakespeare, if he had wanted "to inculcate a more tolerant attitude toward the Hebrew race," would not have "selected for his hero a rich Jewish merchant plotting the murder of a Christian rival by means ef a fraudulent contract." Shaw remarked of Irving's performance that "there was no question of a good Shylock or a bad Shylock; he was simply not Shylock at all."

There are a few curious sidelights in Gross's history. Karen Blixen, discussing Shylock with a black African, was bemused when the man regretted that Shylock had given up too easily. While agreeing that the bond allows him te shed no blood, the African pointed out that a red-hot knife does not draw blood and that, in order to ensure a precise pound, the flesh could be sliced off in little bits at a time.

Some sort of climax is achieved with the anachronistic assertion of Yiddish writer Schlomo Bickel that Shylock is "putting forward in our name such a justified and fundamental grievance and complaint that it must not be left unsaid"--at which point one begins to tear at one's hair and shout, "Wait! This is a character in a play written as a comedy, centuries ago! What are you talking about?" The legendary Shylock, maybe. But not the one in The Merchant of Venice.

One wonders what to think of writers and directors and actors (Gross chronicles plenty of them) who insist that because some wacko interpretation of the play is possible-i.e., mooting a homosexual affair between Antonio and Bassanio, with Shylock as a "malevolent mother"---it must have been somewhere in Shakespeare's mind because he was "great." This is like saying that an interpretation of Bach in the manner of Jacques Loussier must have been in Bach's mind because he was a great musician.

Though some of Gress's later chapters become tedious--he is determined to give us the gontzeh megillah on modern performances of Shylock, and not many of them are interesting-- this book is a rich and amusing account of how the critical and/or theatrical imagination can run wild. Maybe unintentionally, it also throws a startling and brilliant spotlight on how drama in the Western world has been perverted by the (early'nineteenth-century and still festering) conviction of its artists that they are moral arbiters in a benighted world. Read it and laugh.

Mr. Greer writes often about theater for NR.