Shylock Is Shakespeare

Shylock, the Jewish moneylender in The Merchant of Venice who famously demands a pound of flesh as security for a loan to his antisemitic tormentors, is one of Shakespeares most complex and idiosyncratic characters. With his unsettling eloquence and his varying voices of protest, play, rage, and refusal, Shylock remains a source of perennial fascination. What explains the strange and enduring force of this character, so unlike that of any other in Shakespeares plays? Kenneth Gross posits that the figure of Shylock is so powerful because he is the voice of Shakespeare himself. Marvelously speculative and articulate, Grosss book argues that Shylock is a breakthrough for Shakespeare the playwright, an early realization of the Bards power to create dramatic voices that speak for hidden, unconscious, even inhuman impulsescharacters larger than the plays that contain them and ready to escape the authors control. Shylock is also a mask for Shakespeares own need, rage, vulnerability, and generosity, giving form to Shakespeares ambition as an author and his uncertain bond with the audience. Grosss vision of Shylock as Shakespeares covert double leads to a probing analysis of the characters peculiar isolation, ambivalence, opacity, and dark humor. Addressing the broader resonance of Shylock, both historical and artistic, Gross examines the characters hold on later readers and writers, including Heinrich Heine and Philip Roth, suggesting that Shylock mirrors the ambiguous states of Jewishness in modernity. A bravura critical performance, Shylock Is Shakespeare will fascinate readers with its range of reference, its union of rigor and play, and its conjecturaleven fictivemeans of coming to terms with the question of Shylock, ultimately taking readers to the very heart of Shakespeares humanizing genius.