Shylock: A Legend and Its Legacy - Hardcover

Gross, John J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0671707078 ISBN 13: 9780671707071

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1993

Synopsis

A sociological look at the influence of Shakespeare's Shylock on world mythology describes the character's creation and his evolution on the stage, and presents writing about him by Proust, James, T. S. Eliot, and others. 10,000 first printing.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

Never has one character of the stage provoked such controversy or achieved such infamy as Shakespeare's enigmatic Shylock. For four centuries the money lender of "The Merchant of Venice" has been reinvented as both villain and victim, as an object of tragedy and comedy, and has been used as an economic symbol and often as a lightning rod for anti-Semitism. But what was Shakespeare's attitude toward the character described on the play's title page in 1600 as "a man of extreme crueltie", and what should be our own? With brilliant historical perspective and insight, theater critic John Gross explores the complex and influential history that has given Shylock a life beyond the play and established him as a figure of world mythology. Illuminating Shylock's evolution on the stage, his importance to writers and psychologists, and his enduring influence on society and culture, John Gross sheds as much light on our own shifting attitudes and beliefs as on the rich and disquieting figure Shakespeare created.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Shylock--stereotype, archetype, icon--is, according to London Sunday Telegram theater-critic Gross (The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters), the only character in a Shakespeare play to have an autonomous life. By tracing Shylock's origins and forms in literature, theater, and political and social history, Gross emphasizes his chameleonlike nature and what it reveals about the cultures in which he appears. An object of fun, contempt, pity, and rage, Shylock first appeared as the ``Satanic Jew''--the evil figure to be overcome--in The Merchant of Venice, written between 1596-98. An archetypal usurer with origins in folklore, politics, and popular culture, he embodied, says Gross, the era's ambiguities toward Jews, money, misers, and, on another level, toward emerging Economic Man, embodied in Shylock as a tough-minded businessman caught up in the court system and unable to protect his family or what he perceives as his rights. In the 18th century, Shylock was played as a clown, or as wolfish and cunning, until Edmund Kean's consummate interpretation in his London debut in 1814, a performance admired and immortalized by Hazlitt for the sympathy it evoked. A Victorian interpretation by Henry Irving displayed a Shylock possessed, the victim of persecution. Since then, Gross contends, literary critics from A.C. Bradley to Mark Van Doren, novelists from Sir Walter Scott to James Joyce, social theorists including Ruskin and Marx, psychologists from Freud to Reich, and all the great actors- -Gielgud, O'Toole, Olivier--have contributed to the evolution of a subtle, conflicted, mysterious Shylock who has acquired the archetypal dimensions of a Don Quixote or Robinson Crusoe. A lucid, perceptive, and learned guide that makes the familiar interesting and the esoteric familiar. A new incarnation for Shylock. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0671707078
• ISBN 13: 9780671707071
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 386