Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-mwx4w Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-03T08:39:53.874Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“Now by My Hood, a Gentle and No Jew”: Jessica, The Merchant of Venice, and the Discourse of Early Modern English Identity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Mary Janell Metzger
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Recent readings of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, which have been concerned primarily with the play's representation of difference, especially that of gender, religion, or race, often leave Jessica out of their analyses. Yet Jessica, as both a Jew and a willing Christian convert, enables the play to resolve the problem posed by the equations of white Christianity and national identity in the emerging discourse of English imperialism: how to render the Jew's difference as a difference of nature and as a difference of faith involving the act of will implicit in Christian baptism? Only by taking Shylock's measure in the light of the gender, racial, and religious ideologies that integrate his daughter into Venetian society can we account for the play's early modern representations of racialized Jews and of the Christians who imagined them.

Type
Special Topic: Ethnicity
Information
PMLA , Volume 113 , Issue 1: Special Topic Ethnicity , January 1998 , pp. 52 - 63
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1998

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Abrahams, Israel “Joachim Gaunse: A Mining Incident in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth.” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 4 (1899-1901): 83–101.Google Scholar
Acts of the Privy Council. Vol. 26 (1596-97). Ed. John Roche Dasent. London: HMSO, 1902.Google Scholar
Adelman, Janet Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest. New York: Routledge. 1992.Google Scholar
Baron, Salo Wittmayer, ed A Social and Religious History of the Jews. 2nd ed. Vol. 4. New York: Columbia UP, 1957.Google Scholar
Bartels, Emily C Spectacles of Strangeness: Imperialism, Alienation, and Marlowe. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1993.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barthelemy, Anthony Black Face, Maligned Race: The Representation of Blacks in English Drama from Shakespeare to Southerne. Baton Rouge: U of Louisiana P, 1987.Google Scholar
Boose, Lynda E “The Comic Contract and Portia's Golden Ring.” Shakespeare Studies 20 (1987): 241–24.Google Scholar
Boose, Lynda E “‘The Getting of a Lawful Race’: Racial Discourse in Early Modern England and the Unrepresentable Black Woman.” Hendricks and Parker 35–54.Google Scholar
Brown, Paul “‘This Thing of Darkness I Acknowledge Mine’: The Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism.” Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism. Ed. Dollimore, Jonathan and Sinfield, Alan. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985. 48–71.Google Scholar
Callaghan, Dympna “Re-reading Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedy of Miriam, Faire Queene of Jewry.” Hendricks and Parker 163–16.Google Scholar
Cohen, Stephen “‘Is This the Law?‘: Legal Ambiguity and Its Effects in The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure.” The Language of Power, the Power of Language: The Effects of Ambiguity on Sociopolitical Structures As Illustrated in Shakespeare's Plays.” The Language of Power, the Power of Language: The Effects of Ambiguity on Sociopolitical Structures As Illustrated in Shakespeare's Plays. The Language of Power, the Power of Language: The Effects of Ambiguity on Sociopolitical Structures As Illustrated in Shakespeare's Plays. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987. 80–118.Google Scholar
Cohen, Walter “The Merchant of Venice and the Possibilities of Historical Criticism.” ELH 49 (1982): 765–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Edwards, John, ed The Jews in Christian Europe, 1400-1700. New York: Routledge, 1988.Google Scholar
Erickson, Peter “Representations of Blacks and Blackness in the Renaissance.” Criticism 35 (1993): 499–527.Google Scholar
Ezell, Margaret The Patriarch's Wife. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1987.Google Scholar
Felsenstein, Frank “Jews and Devils: Anti-Semitic Stereotypes of Late Medieval and Renaissance England.” Journal of Literature and Theology 4.1 (1990): 15–28.Google Scholar
Ferber, Michael “The Ideology of The Merchant of Venice.” English Literary Renaissance 20.3 (1990): 431–43.Google Scholar
Feuer, Lewis S “Francis Bacon and the Jews: Who Was the Jew in the New Atlantis?” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 29 (1988): 1–25.Google Scholar
Foa, Anna “The New and the Old: The Spread of Syphilis (1494-1530).” Sex and Gender in Historical Perspective. Ed. Muir, Edward and Ruggiero, Guido. Trans. Galluci, Margaret A. with Galluci, Mary M. and Galluci, Carole C. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990. 26–45.Google Scholar
Foxe, John Actes and Monuments. London, 1563. Rev. ed. 1570.Google Scholar
Friedman, Jerome “Jewish Conversion, the Spanish Pure Blood Laws and Reformation: A Revisionist View of Racial and Religious Antisemitism.” Sixteenth Century Journal 18 (1987): 3–29.Google Scholar
Gallagher, Catherine “George Eliot and Daniel Deronda: The Prostitute and the Jewish Question.” Sex, Politics, and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Novel. Ed. Yeazell, Ruth Bernard. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986. 39–62.Google Scholar
Gerber, Jane S The Jews of Spain: A History of the Sephardic Experience. New York: Free, 1992.Google Scholar
Gibbon, Charles How to Bestow Children in Marriage. London, 1591.Google Scholar
Gilman, Sander The Jew's Body. New York: Routledge, 1991.Google Scholar
Greenblatt, Stephen “Marlowe, Marx, and Anti-Semitism.” Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture. New York: Routledge, 1990. 40–58.Google Scholar
Greenblatt, Stephen Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gwyer, John “The Case of Dr. Lopez.” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 16 (1952): 163–16.Google Scholar
Hakluyt, R The Principal Navigations, Voyages Traffiques, and Discoveries of the English Nation. Ed. Raleigh, Walter, London, 1600.Google Scholar
Hall, Kim F “Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? Colonization and Miscegenation in The Merchant of Venice.” Renaissance Drama 23 (1992): 87–111.Google Scholar
Hall, Kim F “I Rather Would Wish to Be a Black-Moor: Beauty, Race and Rank in Lady Mary Wroth's Urania.” Hendricks and Parker 178–17.Google Scholar
Hall, Kim F Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995.Google Scholar
Hendricks, Margo, and Parker, Patricia, eds Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period. New York: Routledge, 1994.Google Scholar
Hotine, Margaret “The Politics of Anti-Semitism: The Jew of Malta and The Merchant of Venice.” Notes and Queries 38.1 (1991): 35–38.Google Scholar
Hulme, Peter Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1797. London, Methuen, 1986.Google Scholar
Hunter, G. K “The Theology of Marlowe's The Jew of Malta.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 27 (1964): 211–21.Google Scholar
Hyamson, Albert The Sephardim of England. London: Methuen, 1951.Google Scholar
Ingram, Martin Church Courts, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1570-1640. London: Cambridge UP, 1997.Google Scholar
Johnson, Paul A History of the Jews. New York: Harper, 1987.Google Scholar
Katz, David S Jews in the History of England. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994.Google Scholar
Katz, David S Philosemitism and the Readmission of the Jews to England. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1982.Google Scholar
Kyngesmill, Andrewe “Godly Advise Touchyng Mariage.” A View of Man's Estate. London, 1580. Jiv-L8v.Google Scholar
Lawrence, Normand “Reading the Body in The Merchant of Venice.” Textual Practice 5 (1991): 55–73.Google Scholar
Leventen, Carol “Patrimony and Patriarchy in The Merchant of Venice.” The Matter of Difference: Materialist Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare. Ed. Wayne, Valerie. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991. 59–79.Google Scholar
McKewin, Carole “Counsels of Gall and Grace: Intimate Conversations between Women in Shakespeare's Plays.” The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare. Ed. Lenz, Carol Ruth Swift, Greene, Gayle, and Neely, Carol Thomas. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1980. 117–11.Google Scholar
Moisan, Thomas “‘Which Is the Merchant Here? And Which the Jew?‘: Subversion and Recuperation in The Merchant of Venice.” Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology. Ed. Howard, Jean E., O'Connor, Marion F., and Ferguson, Margaret. New York: Methuen, 1987. 188–206.Google Scholar
Mullaney, Steven The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988.Google Scholar
Neely, Carol Thomas “Circumscriptions and Unhousedness: Othello in the Borderlands.” Shakespeare and Gender: A History. Ed. Barker, Deborah and Kamp, Ivo. New York: Verso, 1995. 302–30.Google Scholar
Neill, Michael “Unproper Beds: Race, Adultery, and the Hideous in Othello.” Shakespeare Quarterly 40 (1989): 383–412.Google Scholar
Netanyahu, B The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain. New York: Random, 1995.Google Scholar
Newman, Karen “‘And Wash the Ethiop White’: Femininity and the Monstrous in Othello.” Fashioning Femininity and Renaissance Drama. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991. 79–93.Google Scholar
Newman, Karen “Portia's Ring: Unruly Women and Structures of Exchange in The Merchant of Venice.” Shakespeare Quarterly 38 (1987): 19–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Oz, Avraham “‘Which Is the Merchant Here? And Which the Jew?‘: Riddles of Identity in The Merchant of Venice.” Shakespeare and Cultural Traditions: Selected Proceedings of the International Shakespeare Association World Congress, Tokyo, 1991. Ed. Tetsuo, K., Pringle, R., and Wells, S. Newark: U of Delaware P, 1994. 155–15.Google Scholar
Poliakov, Leon The History of Anti-Semitism. Vol. 1. Trans. Howard, Richard. New York: Vanguard, 1965.Google Scholar
Pratt, Mary Louise “Scratches on the Face of the Country; or, What Mr. Barrow Saw in the Land of the Bushmen.” Critical Inquiry 12 (1985): 119–11.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Prior, Roger “A Second Jewish Community in Tudor London.” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 31 (1990): 137–13.Google Scholar
Rabb, Theodore K “The Stirrings of the 1590s and the Return of the Jews to England.” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 26 (1979): 26–33.Google Scholar
Roth, Cecil A History of the Jews in England. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1964.Google Scholar
Said, Edward Orientalism. London: Routledge, 1978.Google Scholar
Samuel, Edgar “The Readmission of the Jews to England in 1656, in the Context of English Economic Policy.” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 31 (1990): 153–15.Google Scholar
Schochet, Gordon The Authoritarian Family and Political Attitudes in Seventeenth-Century England: Patriarchalism in Political Thought. New Brunswick: Transaction, 1988.Google Scholar
Shakespeare, William The Merchant of Venice. The Riverside Shakespeare. Ed. Evans, G. Blakemore. New York: Houghton, 1974. 254–25.Google Scholar
Shapiro, James Shakespeare and the Jews. New York: Columbia UP, 1996.Google Scholar
Sisson, C. J “A Colony of Jews in Shakespeare's London.” Essays and Studies 23 (1938): 38–51.Google Scholar
Trachtenberg, Joshua The Devil and Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its Relation to Modern Antisemitism. New Haven: Yale UP, 1943.Google Scholar
Whigham, Frank “Ideology and Class Conduct in The Merchant of Venice.” Renaissance Drama 10 (1979): 93–115.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wolf, Lucien “Jews in Elizabethan England.” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 11 (1924-27): 1–91.Google Scholar
Yardeni, Myriam Anti-Jewish Mentalities in Early Modern Europe. New York: UP of America, 1990.Google Scholar