Shaul Bassi
Summary
I talked about what one might call the "theological memory" of Shylock's body, looking at those religious notions that may have shaped or at least contributed to Shakespeare's plot and at the ways in which these notions have been translated and transfixed in secular culture.Shylock's body (the body of the character and the body of the actors who have impersonated him over the ages) is also a body politic to the extent that every society (a body politic) implies a certain normative body for individual citizens and Shylock has often represented - consciously or unconsciously - a deviation from that norm in modern Western societies.
The pound of flesh to be cut near Antonio's heart can then be read as a literal misreading (since Jews have often been accused of being too literal-minded, incapable of grasping the allegorical and metaphorical truths of the spirit) of Paul's advocation of a spiritual "circumcision of the heart" that had to replace the literal incision of the flesh required by Judaism. But the blood-thirsty Shylock also conjures up ominously the blood libel and the false accusation of ritual murders that had the Jews expelled from England and persecuted in Europe and elsewhere from the Middle Ages well into the Nineteenth-century, occasionally resurfacing in urban legends that accuse Israeli soldiers of drinking the blood of Palestinian children or stealing their organs.
Through a gallery of images I've tried to demonstrate how anxieties over the body of the Jew (and Shylock's most famous speech is about his body) reflect in changing styles of acting Shylock, of embodying him on stage, of adding a fake nose to his face at the time in which his Jewish gaberdine is replaced by Western clothes, when a racial mark replaces the yellow badge that Jews had to wear. And precisely when Sir Henry Irving makes popular a sympathetic and diginified Shylock who weeps for his eloped daughter and elicits the understanding of his Victorian audience, his assistant Bram Stoker creates a monster - Dracula the vampire - whose racial characteristics and thirst for blood are uncannily similar to that ascribed to the many Eastern European Jews who were settling in London to escape the pogroms.
Shylock then is not only a dramatic character, but also the historical unconscious of a long-standing attitude of Christian/Secular Europe towards Jews and their corporeality, which today is oddly transferred, as Sander Gilman has brilliantly demonstrated, towards Muslims, the new troubling bodies of the Western body politic.
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