The Merchant of Venice is a comedy written by
William Shakespeare around 1597. It tells the story of two Venetian merchants who loathe each other, Antonio and Shylock, and their business deal undertaken on behalf of Antonio's good friend, Bassanio. One of the merchants, Shylock, is a Jew living in the heavily Christian Venetian society; and religious prejudice and tension infuse the entire play.
For Shakespeare, writing to an English audience about a Jewish moneylender might have seemed unusual, as Jews had been banished from England in 1290 under
The Edict of Expulsion. How was Shakespeare to explain the Jewish presence to Elizabethan audiences, who had little exposure to Jewish culture and religion? Shakespeare's literary rival,
Christopher Marlowe had actually just written a play called
The Jew of Malta in 1589. That play’s title character was a Jew named Barabas, and as a greedy, cunning, and murderous stereotype, he fit the bill of "stock" Jewish characters that Elizabethan theatergoers of the time loved to hate. Of course, since there were no actual Jews publicly living in England, the worst kinds of stereotypes and legends about the entire group could prevail unchecked. The stories got more and more fantastic, including everything from sacrificing kidnapped Christian children on
Easter to killing full-grown Christians for their blood to be used in
Passover rituals. Christopher Marlowe’s play, and his inexplicably evil Jewish protagonist, sparked English thinking about the long-absent English Jews.
But what really made the Jewish tradition a popular topic of hatred was an assassination plot against Queen Elizabeth. Unfairly, all Jews were lumped into the same group and symbolized by one man, Roderigo Lopez.
Though Jews had been officially banned from England for nearly 300 years, small groups of Jews actually had come to Protestant England to escape the Catholic
Spanish Inquisition. They lived in
Elizabethan England and many made a cosmetic conversion from Judaism to Christianity. This meant that while they were Christians on paper, they still held onto their Jewish heritage and culture without openly practicing the religion. These people, called “Marranos” or “Conversos,” seemed to find some relative peace residing in a Protestant nation.
In 1593,
Queen Elizabeth's physician,
Roderigo Lopez, was accused of trying to poison her as part of a plot in alliance with the King of Spain. Lopez was soon convicted of treason, hanged, drawn, and quartered. While not much of his body remained, what he did leave behind was a new outbreak of anti-Jewish sentiment. Lopez, born in Portugal, was a Marrano, and the people were again hyped on hating Jews. Marlowe’s
Jew of Malta was revived.
Shakespeare, with his pulse on the popular interest, presented
The Merchant of Venice around 1597, hot on the heels of the Lopez trial. What is interesting about Shakespeare's Jewish merchant, Shylock, is that depending on how you read the story, he is not a caricature of all-things-evil like Marlowe's Barabas. In fact, Shylock speaks the most famous lines of the play in Scene III when he defends Jews as humans deserving the same rights and respect as Christians.