Cool thing learned about Merchant of Venice

[xiphias]

Crossposted to bard_in_boston and weirdjews

An interesting thing I learned at the Actors' Shakespeare Project Conversations about the play:

There are good things and bad things about having a Jew playing Shylock in Merchant of Venice. The bad thing is that religious Jews read texts that they care about with the same care and introspection that they bring to the Torah, which, I believe, is entirely inappropriate for Shakespeare, which was written by a human.

The good thing . . . Jeremiah Kissel is a ba'al koreh for his shul . . . and, a couple weeks ago, found the name "Shylock" in the Torah.

See, we've all assumed that "Shylock" was just a name that Shakespeare made up out of whole cloth. But Kissel was reading Parshat Noach . . . and found, in Genesis 11:12, "When Arpachshad had lived 35 years, he begot Shelah".

In Hebrew, that name is שָׁלַח -- a better transliteration would be "Shelakh". Which would go into English as "Shylock".

Jeremiah Kissel solved one of the ongoing niggling mysteries of Shakesperian scholarship -- where the hell the name "Shylock" comes from. Of course, it raises a NEW niggling mystery, of how the heck Shakespeare was AWARE of this name -- in English translations of the time, the closest I can find is the spelling "Shelah" in the Geniva Bible -- the other translations put it "Sale", which is even farther away.

One mystery potentially solved, an even more interesting mystery opened. That's the way it goes, right?

Comments

Re: huh?

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Nope -- that's not what I meant. Jews read the Torah with close reading, poring over the meaning of every single word, every construction, every tiny detail.

Shakespeare, on the other hand, was writing under deadline pressure, re-writing on the fly, and chosing words for metrical value as much as meaning. That means that spending days arguing why Shakespeare used THIS spelling instead of THAT one is basically pointless.

It may be pointless with the Torah, too, but, at least, for that, we have the belief that it's G-d's Inspired Word, in which every word IS holy. Thinking that every word of Shakespeare's is Divinely Inspired is just a form of idolatry, specifically, Bardolatry. Which doesn't add anything to the plays, and makes it harder to perform them.

Re: huh?

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

I may be attempting to make the opposite point -- I think that the tools of close reading are inappropriately restrictive to reading Shakespeare. The tools of close reading are designed to help wrestle with texts that, for cultural and religious reasons, we do not simply dismiss as wrong. But there's no reason we can't just, if we want, change stuff in Shakespeare.

[noveldevice.livejournal.com]

Awesome!

[mightydoll.livejournal.com]

it seems feasible that it wasn't a wholly unheard of name for a jew of that period. Perhaps shakespeare once met someone named for this talmudic character

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Personally, I disagree, and I don't think that's likely.

First, Jews were expelled from England three hundred years previously, and not let in again until Cromwell's time (with only a few exceptions: a few highly-placed special individuals were let in on a very limited basis)

Second, there are NO historical instances of real people with the names "Tubal" or "Shylock", pretty much ANYWEHRE, except that passage in Genesis, and in Merchant of Venice.

Also, the name "Jessica" never shows up anywhere before that -- that's another name Shakespeare made up.

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

Might be worth investigating whether Shakespeare had contacts amongst Christian Hebraists, who were something of a feature of the Renaissance. Oxford and Cambridge both had Regius Professors of Hebrew when Merchant of Venice was written, both of whom went on to work on the Hebrew translations for the King James Bible.

An alternative hypothesis, which fits with speculation that Shakespeare was a secret Catholic, is that he might have come into contact with conversos who disguised themselves as Catholics in order to flee from England to the Low Countries after the arrest of the converso Rodrigo Lopez in 1596 on treason charges (he had been physician to Elizabeth I). Some conversos are thought to have continued to worship as Jews in secret, so would presumably have been able to read enough Hebrew to suggest some names.

[gingicat]

I like both of these. :)

[bluerosesgirl.livejournal.com]

ARGH you and I were in the same room last night! Greg and I were on the far right (facing the stage) at the wall-end of the second row, directly behind the actors.

What a great conversation. I love ASP more every day.

[cheshyre]

We were sitting front row, dead center. I was the one who asked about the homoeroticism.