Shylock Is Shakespeare by Kenneth Gross

Author:Kenneth Gross
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: University of Chicago Press

That Shylock comes into the Venetian court so complexly caught up in recollections of Old Testament figures, human and divine, is one way in which the play dismantles any too simple a Pauline theater of Law and Mercy. Just as much is such a theater compromised by Portia, who is herself its chief architect and yet who makes one conscious of that theater’s opportunism as much as its sacredness.

In the opposition of Shylock and Portia—whom here see each other for the first time—we witness a kind of localized war of the theaters. Portia disguised as a young lawyer speaks for a very different idea of dramatic power from what we see in the case of Shylock. The masks of Portia’s theater do not hew so closely to the face as those of Shylock’s. They do not burn into the skin. They give the wearer power, they allow her to explore otherwise unrevealed resources of mind, will, and language. But the donning of such a mask does not subject Portia to her own darkness, as Shylock’s does, or provoke in others such a feeling of doubt and menace. Her theater rather shows us the actor as witty, pragmatic disguiser, someone concealed from others and yet not concealed from herself, perhaps because there is nothing to conceal. It makes her into a knowing allegorist, but never a daimonic agent. Her action is not without its mortal stakes and has a powerful, almost magical charm. Yet if Portia, shamanlike, presides over an exorcism, even a sacrifice, helping to remove a demon from the community, this is for her a bloodless ritual. It leaves her untouched and untransformed, having hazarded nothing.

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