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Shylock and Jessica by Maurycy Gottlieb

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Shylock’s question in the ‘Merchant of Venice‘ and how it relates to the novels, the show, and even the comic book. This is the first post in a series exploring how this play is foundational to Sookie’s story.

Merchant is the most controversial of all of Shakespeare’s works because the villain, the moneylender Shylock, is Jewish. The play was used as propaganda by the Nazis and is frequently cited as an example of antisemitism.

In Elizabethan England, Jews were as scarce as tits on a turtle. They had been expelled from the country three hundred years before, so hardly anyone had any direct experience with them. In literature they were portrayed as the blackest villains, practitioners of witchcraft, and in league with Satan.

Shylock is a departure from how Jews were typically depicted, as has been recognized throughout the history of the play. He transcends the stock villain that a comedy of this nature calls for. In Shylock, Shakespeare created a multifaceted tragic figure, an outsider who loses his family, his wealth, and his identity because of his bitter hatred and his thirst for vengeance, which was cultivated by the dominant Venetian society, which stigmatized and oppressed Jews.

Shylock’s most famous speech, his plea for tolerance, not only humanizes him, but goes to the root of his villainy. What is its cause? The villainy that has been perpetrated against him. He is modeling what he has been taught.

He hath disgraced me, and
hindered me half a million; laughed at my losses,
mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my
bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine
enemies; and what’s his reason? I am a Jew. Hath
not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs,
dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with
the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject
to the same diseases, healed by the same means,
warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as
a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?
If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison
us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not
revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will
resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian,
what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian
wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by
Christian example? Why, revenge. The villany you
teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I
will better the instruction.

The character in True Blood who most resembles Shylock as a sympathetic villain is Russell Edgington. Like Shylock the one love in his life, his child, was taken from him by his enemies.

Denis O’Hare explains how he perceives Russell–

“In my mind, he’s not the villain. He’s the hero. I play him like a hero. He has his agenda, and his agenda is correct. He has people he loves and he has desires and needs. If you look at it from his point of view — if Eric, Sookie, and Bill are the villains — they do terrible things to him. They double-cross him, they lie to him, they use him. They kill his lover of 700 years. They take from him, then spurn his offerings. We always play the scenes straight-up. He’s desperate to believe he can have a friend in Bill. He truly decided that Eric was someone who thought like him and felt like him. He thought he’d found an ally. It’s incredibly hurtful.“

Behind this characterization is a century worth of actors who owe their sympathetic portrayals of Shylock to a similar point of view. To them, Portia, Bassanio, and Antonio are the villains who have beset Shylock. They double cross him, lie to him, and use him.

If  alchemy demonstrates how benevolence and sacrifice create an ascending and expanding spiral of enlightenment and love for all it touches, then Merchant depicts the  opposite and shows how ignorance, prejudice, and hate leads to a spiral of violence and retribution. Shylock’s demand for a pound of Antonio’s flesh only comes after a lifetime of abuse. In Eric’s feud with Russell, we see the same escalation of violence depicted in Merchant. In Bill’s lies and murders we see what Shylock knows, abuse and neglect are the genesis of evil. Bill is what he is because of what he has endured at the hands of an uncaring world. While we can sympathize with his pain and understand how he became the killer that he is, it does not excuse him. He is still morally responsible for his actions.

The recurring image of his bleeding heart is a metaphor for Bill’s suffering.

Bill's heart bleeds when he's wounded in the war.

Bill's heart bleeds in the car with Gus and Coot.

Bill's heart bleeds when he is attacked by wolves.

Dried blood over Bill's heart shows where Lorena cut him.

Contrast Bill’s untended wounds with Alcide’s and Tommy’s.

Sookie tending Alcide's wound

Tommy's wound most likely tended by Sam

All suffer. The difference is some have people who care about them to share their pain and tend their wounds; others don’t. God help us because if we don’t care for those who are suffering, we will have to care for those they lash out at and wound. This is the  message of Shylock, the victimizer, and Sookie, the victim.

Part II, ‘Portia’
*Screencaps courtesy of Shadow of Reflection