Shylock’s humanity

Dear Sir, David Aaronovitch is right that Shylock’s character is shaped by Elizabethan antisemitic stereotypes (In modern football, a Jew can’t be a true English gentleman, 13 August).

Where he is wrong is the idea that that is all Shylock’s character is. The reason Shakespeare is a better dramatist than Marlowe is because Shakespeare always complicates things; a lesser dramatist would not have given us Shylock’s impassioned defence of his position in his “Hath not a Jew eyes” speech. No villain in Shakespeare’s best plays is ever without some justification for his actions (Iago excepted).

Stephen Greenblatt notes that the cadences of Shylock’s speeches mimic a native Hebrew speaker; if true, this would suggest a surprising commitment to authenticity on Shakespeare’s part if all he intended was to create a crowdpleasing pantomime villain like Marlowe’s Barabas.

Shakespeare was the product of his time and could not avoid absorbing the prevailing antisemitism of his age, but the reason that his plays are better than his contemporaries’ is because he sees humanity even in people he considered his enemies. When I have taught The Merchant of Venice to students, Jewish and non-Jewish, they have always understood the distinction.

Lucy Solomon

N2 0SY

Reading David Aaronovitch should make us think how important it is not to feed the beast by internalising, and then reiterating, these jibes. It is painful to hear such inanities as “I’m allowed to tell antisemitic jokes because I’m Jewish”. Non-Jews who hear them can thereby think we are not offended by such things and spread them in turn.

Please, nobody delude themselves that they can confine such talk to Jewish company. Walls have ears.

Jeff Lewis

Whitefield M45