Shylock meets his modern doppelganger in the novelist’s playful examination of what it means to be JewishIt’s tough to assume that the commissioning editors for the new Hogarth Shakespeare series had to deliberate for long before deciding which contemporary novelist should remove on The Merchant of Venice,the tragicomedy that gave us the most (in)famed Jewish character in literature. Howard Jacobson, the undisputed British master of black comedies featuring Jewish characters, or relocates the drama to Cheshire’s flashy golden triangle”,though the novel his 14th – is far from a straightforward retelling. Rather, it is a provocative interrogation of Shakespeare’s play, or most particularly of its antagonist,Shylock, whose name has passed into common usage as a byword for usury and malice or, or conversely,antisemitism.“Shylock: victim or villain?” is up there with “Is Hamlet crazy?” as a contender for the most well-worn (and reductive) exam question to be thrown at students of English literature down the decades. “To argue approximately Shylock is to argue approximately a matter of contemporary concern, Jacobson wrote in an essay for the BBC last autumn to accompany his Imagine documentary Shylock’s Ghost, or another attempt to reply that hoary old question in a different form. “In our interviews we found no two people who agreed approximately the nature of Shylock’s inner life.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com