SHYLOCK REVISTED
Novelist looks at Shakespeare
SHYLOCK IS MY NAME
Howard Jacobson
Knopf Canada
The Times newspaper recently described Howard Jacobson as “Britain’s resident grumpy old man of Jewish letters.”
But how much of a curmudgeon is he really? Consider what happened a few years ago at the revered Hay Literary Festival when someone asked the Man Booker Prize-winning novelist a question he was tired of hearing: How does he like being called the English Philip Roth?
Jacobson playfully replied that he saw himself as a “Jewish Jane Austen.”
That’s characteristic of an author who pursues serious subjects while also writing funny. Which is why there are laugh-out-loud moments in Shylock Is My Name, his audacious new novel that reimagines Shakespeare’s controversial The Merchant of Venice for the 21st century and revisits the burning question of whether Shylock is villain or victim.
Indeed, Jacobson’s capacity for mischief is evident in Shylock’s very first appearance in the book. The fabled Jewish moneylender is at his wife’s grave in a northern England cemetery — reading her excerpts from Roth’s notorious masturbation fantasy, Portnoy’s Complaint. So what about this Roth thing? “I have huge admiration for Philip Roth,” Jacobson says over a pot of tea in Soho’s legendary Groucho Club. “I think he’s a very good prose writer. He used to make me laugh.”
However — and here’s the qualifier — “he can be a bit of a brute.”
As for likening himself to Austen — well maybe it was “a joke” to do so. On the other hand, maybe not. Jacobson reiterates his bewilderment with comparisons to such Jewish American writers as Roth, Woody Allen and Saul Bellow.
“I admire those people, but that’s not the tradition I learned to write in,” Jacobson says. “I’m in England and absolutely straight down the line of Jane Austen, George Eliot and Dickens. I’m one of those.”
In conversation and demeanour, the 73-year-old Jacobson exhibits a kind of craggy stoicism leavened with dashes of humour. “Life is a comic novel,” he says as he remembers what happened when he was invited to join such other renowned authors as Margaret Atwood, Anne Tyler and Joanna Trollope in writing modernized versions of Shakespeare’s plays.
Anti-Semitic websites — “places I suppose I should take no notice of” — had a field day when it was revealed that Jacobson would be delivering his take on The Merchant of Venice.
“One said that this was like asking Shylock himself to rewrite the play,” Jacobson says. “There was some assumption that this was a Jew rewriting Shakespeare to tell Shakespeare how to do it.”
Such absurdities make Jacobson smile. “Me — undoing Shakespeare?” he scoffs. After all, he’s a veteran Shakespeare scholar who has taught the Bard’s works and whose first published book was titled Shakespeare’s Magnanimity.
When the editors of the new Hogarth Shakespeare series of modernized versions approached him about the project, Jacobson was enthusiastic, telling his agent, “Great, I’d like to do Hamlet.” That was met with silence, so Jacobson, said, “Jealousy’s fun to write about, so I’ll do Othello.”
After more silences and more discussions. Jacobson got the message. They wanted him to tackle The Merchant of Venice with all the accompanying baggage, including its purported anti-Semitism.
Jacobson needed to think about that one — to ponder the implications of taking on the story of the Jewish moneylender Shylock, his obsession with receiving a pound of flesh from defaulting merchant Antonio, and the trial that left Shylock humiliated and defeated.
He hadn’t read the play since he was at school. “I was 14 — a quarter of the school was Jewish and we were all quite close,” he says, “and we laughed at Shylock’s ‘Hath not a Jew eyes?’ speech because we were embarrassed by it and would use it as part of a comic routine.”
But now he read the play again. He had never taught it. He had shied away from it — even avoiding performances.
“And then I read it, and I thought, ‘This is a fantastic play and Shylock is absolutely fascinating and engrossing.’
“So I said ‘I’ll do it’ — and not for a second have I regretted it.”
He decided on a post-trial narrative, figuring that simply to retell the story of the play in modern dress would be “corny.” He cheerfully eliminated characters and situations he couldn’t stand — beginning with the wealthy Portia, Shylock’s courtroom nemesis, and her “boring” search for an acceptable suitor. But Shylock would appear in a modern setting: “How and where was something I would have to figure out,” he says.
That setting would be northwest England’s wealthy Golden Triangle, and he would be hooking Shylock up with a moneyed Jewish art collector named Strulovitch, who is given to pondering the nature of Jewishness and who — like the Shylock of the play — has a teenage daughter who has gone off the rails, in this instance to live with a dimwitted goy given to Nazi salutes.
Although Portia doesn’t make it into modern times, her “shallow and ugly world” finds its equivalent in Jacobson’s savagely funny portrait of a self-absorbed realitytelevision star named Plurabelle. As for that pound of flesh that figures so prominently in the play — well, let’s just say that in his novel there’s much ado about foreskins.
So is Shakespeare’s play antiSemitic? Jacobson hopes to take readers beyond that endless debate.
“We’re in a richer world than that, a more complex world of values than that,” he says. “But I want them to think about Jewishness. I want them to take a measure of the anger a Jew feels and has the right to feel. And I want them to be humanized by that.”
For all its underlying seriousness, the novel seeks to entertain.
“Well, you’ve got to do that,” Jacobson says. “The first responsibility of literature is to entertain.”