Edgar Rosenberg, American film and television producer, has characterized 'the image of the Jew in English literature' as having been "a depressingly uniform and static phenomenon". For example, although Jews were expelled from England in 1290, stereotypes were so ingrained and so durable that they persisted in English society as evidenced by presentations in English literature, drama, and the visual arts during the almost four-hundred-year period when there were virtually no Jews present in the British Isles. Dik Van Arkel notes that "Chaucer, Marlowe and Shakespeare had no direct knowledge of Jews."