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Shakespeare and the Jews
Going against the grain of the dominant scholarship on the period, which generally ignores the impact of Jewish questions in early modern England, James Shapiro presents how Elizabethans imagined Jews to be utterly different from themselves----in religion, race, nationality, and even sexuality. From strange cases of Christians masquerading as Jews to bizarre proposals to s
...morePaperback, 320 pages
Published
August 28th 1997
by Columbia University Press
(first published April 15th 1995)
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A more accurate title would have been “Jews and Jewish Identity in England, 1290-1833,” but that wouldn’t have attracted as many readers (including me) as Shakespeare and the Jews, and we would have missed an interesting book. Quite a small proportion of the book is about Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, even about its influence: I’m not entirely convinced about the connections between the play and the “Jew Bill” providing for naturalization of Jews in 1753, especially after reading quoted pass...more
An absolutely brilliant work of literary criticism and history. Taking "The Merchant of Venice" as his starting point, Shapiro describes Shakespeare's and Elizabethan England's near obsession with the role of Jews (who had been expelled from England some decades earlier) in Christian society. The iconic "pound of flesh" as a metaphor for circumcision!
An academic text so Shapiro assumes the reader is familiar with much of the criticism of (especially) "The Merchant of Venice" but still worth reading by fans of the play.
Mark Woodland
marked it as to-read
Rahadyan
marked it as to-read
Joseph
marked it as nonfiction-reference
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