Shylock and Antonio: A Psychoanalytic Study on Shakespeare and Antisemitism

The play which we know by the title of The Merchant of Venice was apparently not always called this. The first inscription in the “Stationers' Register” of 1598 speaks in fact of The Jew of Venice, and this name undoubtedly expresses better than the later one the indisputable fact that the key figure is not Antonio, the merchant of Venice, but Shylock, the Jew.

Antonio is above all characterized by his passivity. Shylock, on the other hand, is very different. His character, his actions and his vicissitudes disquiet and excite us all the time. So much does his figure stand out amidst the cheerful and shallow young Venetian aristocrats who surround him that his gigantic shadow darkens even the scenes in which he does not appear. While Antonio bores us more than once, the Jew moves us in every instant, be it to hate or to laughter, to terror or to compassion.

Hate—laughter—terror—compassion—what a curious mixture of emotions! We do not find it difficult to join J. Dover Wilson (26) when he mentions Shylock as the first among “the three characters of the first order which have given rise to serious perplexity and difference of opinion among critics.” And how much more enigmatic the question becomes when we have to admit that the remarkable contradictions in the Jew's character which clearly determine his outstanding position in the play are by no means due to the intentions of the poet, but emerge in spite of it, in a way against his will.

The bardolatry of the nineteenth century tried to deny it, but the evidence is so overwhelming that we have to face the deplorable fact: the poet's intention in writing The Merchant of Venice was doubtless to present the public of London with an antisemitic comedy. He intended, as Heinrich Heine has it, “for the amusement of the general to represent a tormented werewolf, a hateful, fabulous creature that thirsts for blood and, of course, loses his daughter and his ducats, and is ridicul