Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Reconstructions of the Globe: A Retrospective
- ‘Useful in the Year 1999’: William Poel and Shakespeare’s ‘Build of Stage’
- Reconstructing the Globe: Constructing Ourselves
- From Liturgy to the Globe: the Changing Concept of Space
- The Arithmetic of Memory: Shakespeare’s Theatre and the National Past
- Maximal and Minimal Texts: Shakespeare v. the Globe
- William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet: Everything’s Nice in America?
- Which is the Jew that Shakespeare Knew?: Shylock on the Elizabethan Stage
- A Little Touch of Harry in the Light: Henry V at the New Globe
- Gulls, Cony-Catchers and Cozeners: Twelfth Night and the Elizabethan Underworld
- The Globe, the Court and Measure for Measure
- Macbeth and the Antic Round
- Macbeth / Umabatha: Global Shakespeare in a Post-Colonial Market
- When All is True: Law, History and Problems of Knowledge in Henry VIII
- ‘All which it inherit’: Shakespeare, Globes and Global Media
- ‘Delicious traffick’: Alterity and Exchange on Early Modern Stages
- The 1998 Globe Season
- Shakespeare Performances in England, 1998
- Professional Shakespeare Productions in the British Isles January-December 1997
- The Year's Contributions to Shakespeare Studies 1 Critical Studies
- 2 Shakespeare’s Life, Times, and Stage
- 3 Editions and Textual Studies
- Books Received
- Index
Which is the Jew that Shakespeare Knew?: Shylock on the Elizabethan Stage
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2007
- Frontmatter
- Reconstructions of the Globe: A Retrospective
- ‘Useful in the Year 1999’: William Poel and Shakespeare’s ‘Build of Stage’
- Reconstructing the Globe: Constructing Ourselves
- From Liturgy to the Globe: the Changing Concept of Space
- The Arithmetic of Memory: Shakespeare’s Theatre and the National Past
- Maximal and Minimal Texts: Shakespeare v. the Globe
- William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet: Everything’s Nice in America?
- Which is the Jew that Shakespeare Knew?: Shylock on the Elizabethan Stage
- A Little Touch of Harry in the Light: Henry V at the New Globe
- Gulls, Cony-Catchers and Cozeners: Twelfth Night and the Elizabethan Underworld
- The Globe, the Court and Measure for Measure
- Macbeth and the Antic Round
- Macbeth / Umabatha: Global Shakespeare in a Post-Colonial Market
- When All is True: Law, History and Problems of Knowledge in Henry VIII
- ‘All which it inherit’: Shakespeare, Globes and Global Media
- ‘Delicious traffick’: Alterity and Exchange on Early Modern Stages
- The 1998 Globe Season
- Shakespeare Performances in England, 1998
- Professional Shakespeare Productions in the British Isles January-December 1997
- The Year's Contributions to Shakespeare Studies 1 Critical Studies
- 2 Shakespeare’s Life, Times, and Stage
- 3 Editions and Textual Studies
- Books Received
- Index
Summary
As John Gross remarks in Shylock: Four Hundred Years in the Life of a Legend, 'everyone who writes about the stage history of The Merchant of Venice is doomed to quote, sooner or later', the couplet supposedly spoken by Alexander Pope upon seeing Charles Macklin's portrayal in 1741:
This is the Jew
That Shakespeare drew.
Pope's comment shows that he considered Macklin's hard and bitterly malevolent interpretation to be a welcome corrective to the Shylock of Thomas Doggett and his successors in George Granville's adaptation, The Jew of Venice, a lurid burlesque of the role that had held the stage since 1701. It also shows a yearning, shared by all students of the play, to reconstruct somehow the first Shylock, about whom there is no reliable contemporary information whatsoever - the actor Thomas Jordan's doggerel description,
His beard was red . . .
His habit was a Jewish gown,
That would defend all weather;
His chin turned up, his nose hung down,
And both ends met together
dates from 1664, when the theatre was not, contrary to the view of E. E. Stoll, 'still swayed by the tradition of Alleyn and Burbage'.
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- Information
- Shakespeare Survey , pp. 99 - 106Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999
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