Word: shylocks
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...priggish majordomo Malvolio is the play's pivotal role. He is, along with Shylock, one of Shakespeare's two great comic butts. Malvolio was modeled on Sir William Knollys, Queen Elizabeth's puritanical and much ridiculed comptroller. Both Malvolio and Shylock were so richly written, however, that later ages have often found the roles sympathetic and even tragic. Both offer much leeway to directors and actors. Here, Philip Kerr '63 offers a thoroughly dour and self-inflated misfit who deserves the gulling he gets. In this production, not only is he imprisoned in a dark cell as a lunatic...
...their powerful moral undertow. The characters may be caparisoned in quattrocento raiment, but they speak to eternal situations. When Othello says, "I am black/ And have not those soft parts of conversation/ That chamberers have," he escapes temporal boundaries and becomes the chorus of the ghetto. Similarly, Shylock cries, "... Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? ... if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?" The tone of the merchant's queries seems lifted not from ancient Venice but from some current Security Council dispute...
...England and France working as hard on his bon mots as on his canvases and copper plates. It was entirely fitting that when his collected correspondence was published in 1890, it was entitled The Gentle Art of Making Enemies. Whistler was one of the most vengeful litigants since Shylock. "When I pay you six-and-eightpence, I pay you six-and-eightpence for law, not justice," he once told his solicitor, who had dared suggest that his client be fair...
Alexander Main, the aging hero of "The Bailbondsman," is the modern Shylock, lending money to the innocent and guilty alike, interested only in the fact that they are "good risks." His job thrives on crime, not justice, and it is hampered by the "rulings of the late, unlamentable Warren court." He is the "Phoenician," creating a temporary oasis, a mirage, for the criminals who find themselves in a "desert of mood." He revels in a power which says, if his clients should jump bail, he can legally hunt them down and kill them. The most attractive element of the story...
...Fiedler, the portrait of Shylock is proof positive that Shakespeare is antiSemitic. But is it? Shylock was a moneylender, and usury was long held by Christians to be a horrific sin. In deed, Jews entered the field by default rather than design. Is the Mafia loan shark or the friendly neighborhood bank really less intent than Shylock on getting its pound of flesh? In addition, in the matter of both women and Jews, one should always remember that Shakespeare's world was the world of Christendom. A mind steeped in the Christian tradition had to be wedded...