Shylock
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
one of the principal characters in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. He is a Jew who loans Antonio three thousand ducats on condition that, if it is not paid within three months, the forfeit shall be a pound of the debtor's flesh cut off where Shylock shall choose. Antonio is unable to pay the debt, and the Jew is about to take the forfeit, when Portia, representing a young lawyer, saves Antonio's life and defeats the purpose of the Jew by reminding him that his life is lost if he sheds a drop of Christian blood or takes more or less than the pound of flesh which is lawfully his. Various interpretations of the character of Shylock have been presented by critics and more especially by actors. Until the time of Charles Macklin, an English actor of the eighteenth century, the part was of no real importance on the stage, but was made grotesque by tricks and buffoonery. Macklin gave the role the dignity of a tragedy, representing Shylock as a mercenary, revengeful, bloodthirsty, and inhuman wretch. This is perhaps the most natural feeling to one who reads the play for the first time. Edmund Kean in 1814 first played the part in a way to arouse sympathy with Shylock. Since that time, the majority of commentators have come to agree that Shakespeare intended to picture Shylock as "the representative of a wronged and persecuted race." It is of interest in this connection to note the interpretation of Shylock's character by the Jews themselves. Rabbi Lewinthal says: This is the wail of the Jew uttered for the centuries. This is the cry that went up from Egypt, from the Roman amphitheater, from the dungeons of the Spanish Inquisition. We hear its echo all through the Dark Ages ; and the genius of Shakespeare voiced it as it had never been voiced before--or since. . . . Shylock is a man more sinned against than sinning, whom the inhumanity of the whole world has made inhuman. Long brooding over the shameful treatment of his people has marred his character and dried up the founts of tenderness in his bosom.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's in 1910 could report, with some satisfaction, that most commentators had come round to seeing Shylock as "the representative of a wronged and persecuted race" — the sympathetic reading traced to Edmund Kean in 1814. The Nazi period broke that confidence: the Merchant of Venice was repeatedly staged in Germany after 1933 as antisemitic propaganda, and after the Holocaust the question stopped being how to play Shylock and became whether the play can be played at all without doing harm. Postwar productions have leaned hard on that discomfort — Laurence Olivier's 1970 Shylock, a dignified Victorian financier whose offstage howl closed the scene of his forced conversion, and Al Pacino's in the 2004 film — while the text is now often taught alongside its own history of use rather than as straightforward tragedy. In 2016, marking 500 years of the Venetian Ghetto, the play was performed in the Ghetto itself, with a mock appeal against Shylock's sentence argued afterwards before real judges.
Written for this edition, 2026.