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]

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.