Is Shylock Jewish?: Citing Scripture and the Moral Agency of Shakespeare's Jews
Sara Coodin
Abstract
What happens when we consider Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Veniceas a play with ‘real’ Jewish characters who are not mere ciphers for anti-Semitic Elizabethan stereotypes? Is Shylock Jewish studies Shakespeare’s extensive use of stories from the Hebrew Bible in The Merchant of Venice, and argues that Shylock and his daughter Jessica draw on recognisably Jewish ways of engaging with those narratives throughout the play. By examining the legacy of Jewish exegesis and cultural lore surrounding these stories, this book traces the complexity and richness of Merchant’s Jewish aspect, spanning encou ... More
Keywords: The Merchant of Venice, Shylock, Jessica, moral agency, ethics of reading, anti-Semitic stereotypes, midrash, biblical exegesis, Jewish identity, Yiddish theatre, inter-textuality
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2017 | Print ISBN-13: 9781474418386 |
| Published to Edinburgh Scholarship Online: January 2018 | DOI:10.3366/edinburgh/9781474418386.001.0001 |
