I can also examine how the play has been put on throughout history. In fact, Shylock is recorded to have been played to be viewed and accepted by the audience in many ways, from hostile and despicable to misunderstood and deserving of sympathy. In 1741, we know that Macklin, showed the villainy and maliciousness of Shylock, but did not portray him as a fantastical monster, and so showed that anybody could be similar. However, in 1814, Kean showed Shylock with a completely new side; Shylock was a persecuted martyr to his religion.
The variety of possible portrayals is also shown well in two BBC films that I have seen at school. The first is more modern version, directed by Trevor Nunn and with Henry Goodman as Shylock. The other is slightly older, directed by Jack Gold and stars Warren Mitchell.
In the Nunn production, Shylock is played more sympathetically in the main scene in question, Act IV, Scene 1. He takes time to make the decision to continue with the barbaric act of cutting a pound of flesh, and is visibly moved by Portia’s “The quality of mercy is not strain’d” speech (IV, i, 182-204). He is also very hesitant, and shows enormous amounts of emotion, when he is talking about how he has been mistreated by Antonio, and Antonio is thus made to be a much more unsavoury character. This all makes him a more sympathetic character, without changing a word of the text.
In contrast, in the earlier Gold production, Mitchell portrays Shylock very differently. He appears to be driven by money and revenge, and that all he wants is to spill Antonio’s Christian blood. When confronted by the same Portia speech, he effectively ignores her, and shows no signs of remorse, or even emotion at all. He never appears to hesitate during the scene.
The latter portrayal is, in my opinion, more fitting with the acts of the play, and the Duke’s opening speeches of the scene, when he describes Shylock as “a stony adversary, and inhuman wretch/ Incapable of pity, void and empty/ From any dram of mercy.” (IV, i, 4-6), meaning that he is free of any mercy, of normal human feelings. However, this is just my opinion and it is conceivable that the Duke himself is an anti-Semite, and therefore cannot understand Shylock.
Shylock in the text also appears to be, at least partly, driven by money. When his daughter, Jessica, leaves home, he not only cries for her, but he cries more for the money that she has stolen from him. As Solanio quotes “My daughter! O my ducats! … A sealed bag, two sealed bags of ducats,” (II, 9, 15-18). Money is considered in some of society to be “the root of all evil”, and is probably in fact the principal reason that Shylock wants to harm Antonio in Act IV, Scene 1. Even though Shylock protests that the only reason he is carrying through his bond is for the law “I crave the law” and his religion “By the Holy Sabbath I have sworn…”. He also uses the analogy of a rat pest with Antonio. This suggests that Antonio may be harming him, or at least annoying him, and so he wants to be rid of Antonio for good. I suggest that this is for business purposes because, in a list of reasons that he hates Antonio, Shylock said, as an aside “But more for that in low simplicity/ He lends out money gratis, and brings down/ The rate of usance [the amount of money Shylock can make] with us here in Venice.”
Another way in which the text suggests that Shylock was meant to be portrayed as a villain is through the ‘demonisation’ of Shylock, occurring in three distinct stages. Firstly, in that he is only referred to by the other characters by his name three times. ‘Shylock’ is mostly replaced with ‘the Jew’, or something similar. Next, he has not just had his name stripped away, but also his human status. For example, an “inhuman wretch” (IV, i, 5), or an animal, particularly the wolf and dog images, “O, be thou damned, inexecrable dog” (IV, i, 128). Worst of all, he is in fact in parts explicitly called ‘the devil’, or put alongside the devil. Solanio calls him “the devil…in the likeness of a Jew” (III, i, 19-21).
However, not all the textual evidence supports that Shakespeare intended Shylock to be portrayed as a villain. As I have already shown in the BBC productions, one of the key scenes, as well as other parts of the play, is open to a very high level of ambiguity. Some of the text even positively encourages the audience to be sympathetic towards Shylock. For example, his speech in which he argues, “Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs senses affections, passions?” (III, i, 49-70), or are Jews not the same as Christians. He says that Christians take vengeance, so why is he not allowed the same treatment?
We also feel sympathy for Shylock right at the end of Act IV, scene 1, when Shylock is made to convert to Christianity “That he presently become a Christian;” (IV, i, 385). In our comparatively tolerant modern society, this is a dreadful thing to force someone to do, as most people have learned to respect each other’s cultures and religions. However, it may be that Antonio is not quite as cruel as it seems. Around this time, it was said that those who were not of the Christian faith, could not go to heaven or hell, but would rest in nothingness for eternity. In this way, it is conceivable that Shakespeare was taking pity and giving mercy to Shylock at this point.
Another question I should ask is why was the play set in Venice, and not in London or similar. There are certainly a few possible answers to this. Firstly, Venice would seem exotic, and the name would attract people to the theatre. As well as this, there was a huge variety of cultures represented in Venice, including many money-lending Jews. It is also likely that it was set in Venice, so that Shakespeare could distance his audience from the racist and anti-Semitic actions of the Christians in Venice, and therefore they could not take any offence on the subject. In that way, it is possible that Shakespeare was in fact satirizing the anti-Semitic feeling.
After looking at all the evidence, I have decided that the most likely answer to the question is that Shakespeare did in fact intend Shylock to be portrayed as a villain, because historically this is most likely, and the bulk of the textual evidence suggests it. However, this is not to say that Shakespeare was himself an anti-Semite; he was probably merely humouring the feeling of the period, as a commercial playwright, comparable to a writer of today’s Hollywood films.
