Shylock: A Legend and Its Legacy
Shylock, the villainous Jewish usurer of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, has elicited sharply divergent responses, as Gross reveals in this valuable, entertaining study. To John Ruskin, Shylock was the personification of rapacious capitalism. To psychoanalyst Theodore Reik, the Bard's moneylender was an oral-aggressive personality, his demand for a pound of flesh a symbolic circumcision of Antonio. Film director Ernst Lubitsch drew on the Shylock story in To Be or Not to Be (1942), a satirical attack on Nazism. English theater critic Gross discusses the prominent place of Shylock in anti-Semitic invective. Karl Marx, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Freud, Pushkin, actress Ellen Terry, T. S. Eliot and Henry James figure in a narrative that sheds new light on Shakespeare (whose moneylending father was hauled into court for usury), on anti-Semitism and on a literary figure who has assumed mythic proportions.Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.