Revisiting the Usurer: The Portrayal of Shylock as an Affectionate Father in Howard Jacobson's Shylock Is My Name

119 REVISITING THE USURER: THE PORTRAYAL OF SHYLOCK AS AN AFFECTIONATE FATHER IN HOWARD JACOBSON’S SHYLOCK IS MY NAME Alejandro Nadal Ruiz University of Zaragoza ABSTRACT: This article aims to re-interpret the fi gure of Shylock in William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice by exploring how its novel rewriting by Howard Jacobson provides a more positive portrayal of the Jewish usurer. I attempt to argue that Jacobson’s Shylock Is My Name contributes to re-reading Shylock as a thoughtful father who truly loves his daughter Jessica. Indeed, this 21st-century retelling revolves around the connection between Shylock and Simon Strulovitch, a Jewish philanthropist who has also been neglected by his daughter. The novel presents Shylock as a trustworthy character that is determined to help his friend create an emotional bond with his daughter. Moreover, Jacobson succeeds in empowering Shakespeare’s Shylock to such an extent that he evolves from being an underdog in Venice to being widely respected by English society. As regards methodology, I have used the rhizomatic model proposed by Douglas Lanier with the purpose of exploring the enriching dialogue between the source text and this rewriting. Keywords: Shylock, William Shakespeare, Howard Jacobson, rewritings, Shakespearean rhizomatics. RESUMO: Este artigo visa reinterpretar a fi gura de Shylock em The Merchant of Venice, de William Shakespeare, explorando o modo como a sua reescrita novelística por Howard Jacobson oferece um retrato mais positivo do usurário judeu. Pretendo argumentar que Shylock Is My Name, de Jacobson, contribui para uma releitura de Shylock como pai cuidadoso que verdadeiramente ama a sua fi lha Jessica. De facto, esta versão do 120 Alejandro Nadal Ruiz século XXI gira em torno da ligação entre Shylock e Simon Strulovitch, um fi lantropo judeu que também foi negligenciado pela sua fi lha. O romance apresenta Shylock como uma personagem digna de confi ança que está determinada a ajudar o amigo a criar um laço emocional com a fi lha. Para além disso, Jacobson consegue conferir poder ao Shylock de Shakespeare a tal ponto que ele passa de indivíduo desprezado em Veneza a pessoa amplamente respeitada pela sociedade inglesa. No que respeita a metodologia, foi seguido o modelo rizomático proposto por Douglas Lanier, com o objectivo de explorar o diálogo enriquecedor entre o texto-base e esta reescrita. Palavras-chave: Shylock, William Shakespeare, Howard Jacobson, reescritas, rizoma shakespeariano. 1. Introduction In the introductory section of the volume Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation, Alexa Huang and Elizabeth Rivlin mark that ours is “an age when Shakespeare is increasingly globalized, diversifi ed, spread thin, and applied in service of a multitude of agendas” (2). The globalisation characterizing present-day society has contributed to the permeability of Shakespeare into the realm of popular culture. The spread of such a phenomenon has been boosted by means of a plethora of adaptations which bear some connection with the source text. As noted by Mark Thornton Burnett et al., such adaptations “function across and through history in an intricately layered fashion” (1). The horizontal connection between Shakespeare’s texts and present-day rewritings entails adding new meaningful layers that enrich the source texts to such an extent that they become imperishable. In the case of narrative rewritings of Shakespeare, Marianne Novy argues that they “may give more attention to a minor character, and sometimes that shift drastically alters the balance of sympathies against the character based on Shakespeare’s hero” (51). Indeed, rewriting Shakespeare means bringing to the surface minor themes and characters of the source texts that are of great relevance for better understanding social concerns that are prevalent in all cultures. With this conception of rewriting-as-enriching in mind, this article will provide an analysis of Howard Jacobson’s novel Shylock Is My Name (2016). This novel is a rewriting of William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice set in contemporary England. The focus of this study will fall on how this adaptation calls into question the view that Shylock is an unsympathetic character who is solely concerned with money and religion. As for secondary literature on Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, scholars such as John Drakakis, John Gross, Joan Holmer, Ignaz Maybaum, Julie Mell, and Irene Middleton covertly suggest that, far from being a usurer blinded by his crave Alejandro Nadal Ruiz 121 for money and by his uneasy relationship with Christians, Shakespeare’s Shylock could be sympathetically seen as a soulful character. Furthermore, they imply that Shylock might be seen as a loving father who is concerned with the welfare of his daughter Jessica. However, there is little research into the literary adaptations of this specifi c Shakespeare play. What is more, there are no studies so far on how these adaptations attempt to show Shylock as an affectionate father. Accordingly, the present study will focus on the role of Howard Jacobson’s Shylock as a father who has been neglected by his daughter Jessica but nevertheless shows a deep emotional connection with her. Indeed, this article will attempt to provide a more positive portrayal of this Jewish male character as an affectionate father. My main contention is that Jacobson’s literary adaptation of The Merchant of Venice contributes to showing the hitherto remorseful Jew as a caring father who truly loves his daughter Jessica. As a result, this contemporary rewriting partakes of a rhizomatic relationship with the source text in that it aims to transform and enrich the source text by exploring some of its key aspects in a different, innovative light. With regard to methodology, fi rst I briefl y explore the relationship between Shylock and Jessica in Shakespeare’s work, with a focus on how the Jew reacts to the elopement of his daughter. With a view to foregrounding the enriching dialogue between Shakespeare’s play and Jacobson’s rewriting, I apply the rhizomatic dimension suggested by Douglas Lanier. This rhizomatic approach proves fruitful for assessing to what extent the targeted adaptation enhances the fatherly side of Shylock, both as a counsellor to the other neglected father in the novel and as a fi gure who is admired by those who interact with him. As regards this article’s structure, fi rstly there is a section that explains Lanier’s rhizomatic approach to Shakespearean adaptations and how this scholar’s theory is put into practice in the Hogarth Shakespeare series. After this, some scholarly contentions on the humane facet of Shakespeare’s Shylock are reviewed. Finally, there is a thorough analysis of how Jacobson’s novel contributes to presenting a positive portrayal of the targeted character as an affectionate father. 2. Shakespeare’s Rhizomatics and the Hogarth Shakespeare Project The postmodern endeavour to bring to the fore the (hi)stories of minorities whose voices had been previously erased was a starting point in the proliferation of literary retellings. As Fernando Galván contends, the English literary canon has undergone a “revolution” that translates into “a rereading, an interpretation of canonical works” (187). Such a new interpretation of canonical works has given rise to a large number of literary rewritings or appropriations: in the case of Shakespeare, Ángeles de la Concha maintains 122 Alejandro Nadal Ruiz that the infl ux of retellings is such that rewritings of Shakespeare may be said to have become a subgenre somehow (10). In this context where the canon is revisited, it seems reasonable to adopt an approach that does not favour the source text over the rewriting. In accordance, Christy Desmet proposes addressing appropriations as a “dialogical phenomenon – not simply a conversation or collaboration between appropriating and source texts, but an exchange that involves both sharing and contested ownership” (42). Along the same lines, Susana Onega and Christian Gutleben introduce the concept of refraction: “the assumption of a dialectic relation between the canonical and postmodernist texts, affecting the result as well as the source” (7). Such a dialogical approach is by no means an attempt to explore to what extent the rewriting is faithful to the source text. Instead, the dialogue between both works is analogous to the metaphor of the palimpsest, the palimpsest being “an involuted phenomenon where otherwise unrelated texts are involved and entangled, intricately interwoven, interrupting and inhabiting each other” (Dillon 3-4). In an attempt to go beyond the hackneyed emphasis on the question of fi delity to the original text, Douglas Lanier suggests shifting the focus to the Shakespearean adaptations themselves (“Rhizomatics” 27). In order to do so, he resorts to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s1 concept of the “rhizome”. In the chapter “Shakespearean Rhizomatics: Adaptation, Ethics, Value”, Douglas Lanier explains that Shakespeare appropriations could be understood as “a horizontal, decentered multiplicity of subterranean roots that cross each other, bifurcating and recombining, breaking off and restarting” (28). The adjective horizontal aims to enhance the dialogic and palimpsestic approaches described above: actually, such a horizontal network of relationships guarantees that none of the texts is given more prominence, but both of them have a positive infl uence on the other. Then, Lanier goes on to provide an explanation of the main aim of Shakespearean rhizomes: “A rhizomatic conception of Shakespeare stresses the power of those ever-differentiating particulars [...] to transform and restructure the aggregated Shakespearean fi eld into something forever new” (“Rhizomatics” 31). Hence, an appropriation of a Shakespearean text is not meant to be a mere pastiche or repetition of the source text; what it seeks is to provide an outcome that can be radically different from the original play but that is aimed at fi nding new meanings in the source text. This explanation may support the very nature of the word “rhizome”: unlike in roots, there is nothing fi xed or stable in the source text or in the adaptation; rather, the Shakespearean text could be described as palimpsestic in nature. 1 According to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the rhizome designates a mode of relation involving “the aparallel evolution of two beings that have absolutely nothing to do with each other” (10). Alejandro Nadal Ruiz 123 With this aim in mind, in 2014 Hogarth Press launched the Hogarth Shakespeare Project. The British publishing house commissioned bestselling writers to reimagine and rewrite some of the most acclaimed of Shakespeare’s plays for a 21st-century audience. Thus far, up to seven Shakespeare’s novel rewritings have been published as part of this ambitious project: Jeanette Winterson’s The Gap of Time (2015), on The Winter’s Tale; Howard Jacobson’s Shylock Is My Name (2016), on The Merchant of Venice; Anne Tyler’s Vinegar Girl (2016), on The Taming of the Shrew; Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed (2016), on The Tempest; Tracy Chevalier’s New Boy (2017), on Othello; Edward St. Aubyn’s Dunbar (2017), on King Lear; and Jo Nesbø’s Macbeth (2018), on Macbeth. Additionally, it is expected that a rewriting of Hamlet by Gillian Flynn will be released in the course of 2021. As Sheila Cavanagh has remarked, “the literary pedigrees of the commissioned authors are unassailable, but the quality of the texts presented varies widely” (99). The varying quality of these rewritings notwithstanding, it could be asserted that all of them partake of the rhizomatic conception explained above. Indeed, a dialogue between Shakespeare’s plays and their present-day appropriations from the Hogarth series is established in two ways. First, scholars such as Sofía Muñoz-Valdivieso highlight how the ludic quality of this series enhances the two-way infl uence between source text and adaptation: “[It] forces the writers to never lose sight of Shakespeare’s work and make sure that readers fi nd enough elements that they can recognize from the plays” (108). Second, the process of novelisation allows for a more in-depth psychological portrayal of characters. Along the same lines, Miranda Fay Thomas argues that novelisations of plays “have the potential to offer the reader a direct view into the mind of already well-known characters, adding material to further fl esh out characterisation, motivation, and back story” (43). Hence, the use of developed narrative techniques contributes to reimagining characters that are easily recognisable, such as Hamlet, Othello, and Shylock. Besides enabling the development of these characters’ backstory, the rhizomatic re-imagination of Shakespeare’s plays facilitates the creation of alternative endings and sequels that re-explore aspects that have not been paid much readerly or scholarly attention. In the case of The Merchant of Venice, there is one specifi c retelling that should be briefl y mentioned before dealing with Jacobson’s novel. In 1973, the acclaimed playwright Arnold Wesker was bitterly hurt by Laurence Olivier’s representation of Shylock in Jonathan’s Miller production at the National Theatre. In the preface to his work The Merchant, Wesker reports his discomfort with Shakespeare’s play accordingly: “I was struck by the play’s irredeemable anti-Semitism. It was not an intellectual evaluation but the immediate impact I actually experienced” (l). As a Jewish artist, Wesker answered back by writing the play The Merchant (1976), a text that dignifi es Shylock – and Jewish communities at large – by shifting the focus from usury to solidarity, and by calling for a harmonious coexistence between Christians and Jews. As a matter of fact, Shylock pleads 124 Alejandro Nadal Ruiz with the bigoted Lorenzo: “Learn to live with us. The Jew is the Christian’s parent” (idem 39). Furthermore, Wesker contributes to enhancing Shylock’s understanding by stressing his devotion to books and his unconditional love for his friend Antonio. To a lesser extent, this re-imagination also discloses the Jew’s care for his daughter Jessica: “Nothing I treasure more, except my daughter” (idem 3). Nevertheless, the father-daughter relationship is not a major concern in this play. This family bond is a matter that is elaborated on in the literary adaptation to be studied in this article. Howard Jacobson’s Shylock Is My Name delves into the edgy relationship between Shylock and his daughter Jessica. Prior to exploring how this rewriting contributes to presenting a more humane portrayal of Shylock as a loving father, there should be a brief exploration of the father-daughter relation in The Merchant of Venice. Seemingly, such a relationship could be deemed somewhat secondary in Shakespeare’s play for two reasons: fi rst, there are very few moments in which father and daughter coincide on stage; second, it could be asserted that more prominence has been given to issues such as the individual and collective bond between Christians and Jews, and the fi gure of Shylock as a usurer. However, Jacobson’s novel engages in Lanier’s rhizomatic model and ultimately gives more prominence to the hitherto secondary fatherdaughter tie with a view to re-imagining the behaviour of Shylock. 3. The Relationship Between Shylock and Jessica in The Merchant of Venice The fi rst occasion in which Shylock and Jessica happen to meet on stage is in Act II, Scene V. At this point in the play, Shylock calls his daughter and announces to her that he will not dine at home. After giving Jessica the keys of the house, he urges her to take a number of precautions for fear that trouble is coming: Hear you me, Jessica. Lock up my doors [...] Clamber not you up to the casements [...], Nor thrust your head into the public street, To gaze on Christian fools with varnish’d faces; (II.v.27-33) This passage refl ects the fact that Shylock has a paternalistic attitude towards Jessica, thus pointing to the overarching patriarchy that, according to scholars such as John Drakakis and Irene Middleton, prevails in Shylock’s house. Such a relationship is strengthened by Holmer’s contention that the Jew is “protectively unnatural in his treatment of his daughter” (122). In their seminal work The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar Alejandro Nadal Ruiz 125 maintain the following with regard to authority: “The roots of ‘authority’ tell us, after all, that if woman is man’s property then he must have authored her, just as surely as they tell us that if he authored her she must be his property” (13). Extrapolating this quotation to the aforementioned situation in the play, Shylock might be authoring Jessica by giving her instructions, thus attempting to ensure the continuity of patriarchy. Nevertheless, the hierarchical father-daughter relationship which the Jew may want to preserve comes to an end when Jessica decides to leave her house with the Christian Lorenzo. Shylock’s reaction to this event is reported by Solanio to Solarino: I never heard a passion so confused, So strange, outrageous, and so variable, As the dog Jew did utter in the streets. “My daughter! O my ducats! O my daughter! (II.viii.12-15) The melodramatic response of the Jew shows the pain which he feels for having lost both his daughter and a certain amount of money which has been taken by Jessica. Given that Shylock is a usurer, he might be scathingly criticised for linking such a material element as the ducats to the loss of a relative. However, John Gross brings to the fore Shylock’s humane side by arguing the following: “The one thing about her that is not in doubt is that Shylock loves her. Even the cry that amuses his enemies so much – ‘O my ducats! O my daughter’ – implies that if he did not love her more than his ducats, at least he did not love her less” (60). Along the same lines, Julie L. Mell describes the Jew as “an affectionate husband and loving father” (181). Mell’s contention points to a conversation between Tubal and Shakespeare in Act III, Scene I. In this specifi c dialogue, Tubal announces that he has no news of Jessica, to which Shylock responds in an irrational way by cursing her: “I would my daughter were dead at my foot and the jewels in her ear!” (III.i.84). With regard to this utterance, Jesús Cora-Alonso contends: “When we hear Shylock’s words, we, of course, censure him, we reject and despise him because he is such an uncaring, unnatural father, such a vile miser” (279). However, such a view does not take into account that Shylock has fallen prey to a psychological imbalance caused by the elopement of his daughter. This is the view taken by Ignaz Maybaum, who highlights both Shylock’s disorder and his love for Jessica: “The cursing old man reveals himself as a man of deep emotion. He loves his daughter. He is the father betrayed by his child, whom he never stops loving” (147). Likewise, Irene Middleton asserts that Shylock “should be shown as a deeply grieving father” (301), and John Drakakis maintains that the Jew’s reaction conveys “the emotion of the father faced with the actions of a wayward and unruly daughter”, creating “an 126 Alejandro Nadal Ruiz intensity of feeling from which spectators cannot easily detach themselves” (159). Therefore, the miserly and ill-tempered Jew depicted in Shakespeare’s play could also be seen in a sympathetic way as a grieving father who truly cares for his runaway daughter. Hence, this article will cast light on this nicer portrayal of Shylock by exploring how Jacobson’s novel contributes to presenting him as an affectionate father. 4. The Portrayal of the Loving Father in Shylock Is My Name Howard Jacobson’s novel Shylock Is My Name (2016) re-examines the fi gure of Shakespeare’s Shylock through the exploration of his friendship with Simon Strulovitch, a wealthy Jewish philanthropist living in the Golden Triangle near Manchester. As Douglas Lanier notes, “Jacobson never explains how Shakespeare’s Shylock has come to be in the contemporary English Midlands, instead treating his presence as a narrative donnée” (“Hogarth” 235). Besides lacking an explanation of how the sixteenth-century Venetian Jew has translated into a present-day Mancunian, this novel barely gives a broad hint that the novel’s Shylock is a re-imagination of Shakespeare’s Jewish usurer. What this rewriting does very sporadically is provide descriptions or statements about the contemporary Shylock which readers who are familiar with the source text may ultimately identify as traits belonging to Shakespeare’s character. However, these pieces of information are scattered around the novel, so this novel partakes of the Hogarth series’ ludic quality as highlighted by Muñoz-Valdivieso. In the course of the novel, it is explicitly mentioned that Shylock is a Jewish character that has a sardonic and quickwitted look. It is also acknowledged that his daughter Jessica has left him in order to marry a Christian man. Finally, from the outset of the novel there are references to the fact that he is a widower: it is mentioned that his wife’s name is Leah and that she has passed away. Shylock and his friend-to-be Strulovitch meet in a cemetery in South Manchester, where the former is talking by the tomb of his wife. From this moment onwards, the novel intertwines the two characters’ lives to such an extent that it could be argued that Strulovitch can be considered Shylock’s double. Furthermore, the construction of this double enables Jacobson to provide an in-depth and innovative portrayal of Shakespeare’s Shylock as an affectionate father. The fi rst piece of evidence that suggests a strong bond between Strulovitch and Shylock is their initial descriptions as angrylooking characters. The former is described as a “rich, furious, easily hurt philanthropist with on-again off-again enthusiasms” (Howard 1), and who is passionate about Shakespeare. As regards the latter, the external narrator observes the following: “An infuriated and tempestuous Jew, though his fury tends more to the sardonic than the mercurial” (ibidem). Both of them Alejandro Nadal Ruiz 127 are presented as moody characters, and this quality somehow foreshadows the fact that they have been hurt. In the case of Jacobson’s Shylock, this feeling of being depreciated runs parallel to that of Shakespeare’s Jew, who is characterised by a dismal and grudging attitude. However, there is a key difference in terms of mood between Strulovitch and his companion. Whereas it is suggested that Strulovitch has unpredictable changeableness of temper, Shylock is more whimsical than irrational. This witty trait of the latter is of key relevance for the understanding of how this novel provides a positive portrayal of Shylock: gradually, Shylock’s intelligence contributes to making him an exemplary adviser to the Jewish philanthropist. There is one element that strengthens the bond between the two protagonists throughout the novel, and this is their condition of fathers “on whom the burden of bringing up a daughter had exclusively fallen” (idem 55). Whereas Shylock’s wife passed away, Strulovitch’s second wife suffered a stroke on the day of Beatrice’s fourteenth birthday and has not been able to effectively communicate since then. Their efforts to raise their daughters notwithstanding, both of them are eventually betrayed by them: these female characters elope with two Christians. In the case of Shylock’s (Jessica), she has already left with Lorenzo by the time the narrative starts. As for Strulovitch’s (Beatrice), she decides to elope with Gratan Howsome, a Christian footballer who, to make things worse, is reported to have apparently given the Nazi salute on the pitch. Having been neglected by their respective daughters, so far none of them has found a person to lean on. In the novel, both of them feel helpless by society at large, but at some points they imply that Christian people should be more sympathetic to them, and at least understand their suffering. In the fi rst conversation between Shylock and Strulovitch as friends, Shylock confesses: “We lack charity, they say, but when I ran out to the streets calling for Jessica children jeered at my distress. No charitable Christian parent dragged them home and admonished them for their cruelty” (idem 52). Along the same lines, his double Strulovitch is often shown as a resentful man that bears a grudge against the art importer D’Anton: this homosexual art dealer is complicit in the elopement of Beatrice with the Christian sportsman, thus undermining the pain that the Jewish father is likely to bear. As regards the reason why the daughters have left their parents, in the case of Jessica the novel makes no explicit reference to why she has abandoned Shylock; the only utterance that the notably silent Jew makes with respect to this event is the following: “Jessica was taken from me. After Leah’s ring was stolen” (idem 176). This quotation suggests that Jessica’s elopement might be linked to his father’s patriarchal attitude, since he considered her a belonging to be equated with his wife’s ring. This remark might be misleading, since it implies that Shylock may still be portrayed as a materialistic man in this 21stcentury rewriting. However, as will be discussed later on, the novel provides enough evidence that Shylock is far from being a greedy man. In the case