We do not know for sure how Shylock was portrayed in the earliest productions of The Merchant of Venice, but we have evidence that from the beginning he captured the imaginations of audiences. Although the play is named after Antonio, not Shylock, The Merchant of Venice soon came to be known by an alternate title, The Jew of Venice.During the first half of the eighteenth century, Shylock was played by as a straight comic villain a whining fool. In 1741, a popular actor named Charles Macklin introduced a new way of playing the role. He made Shylock the epitome of evil, a malevolent old man consumed with hatred plotting the downfall of his enemies. In 1814, the famous actor Edmund Kean presented an even more startling version of the character. His Shylock was dignified and austere, almost a tragic hero.

In some recent versions of the play, including a movie adaptation, Shylock becomes so dominant that we begin to see the other characters through his eyes. A 1971 production of The Merchant of Venice created by the avantgarde director Peter Brook ended with the sounds of Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, being played as the "good" Christian characters gather in the final act. Most scholars today agree that Shakespeare never intended to make Shylock a hero. In all probability, the playwright was not even very interested in Shylock's Jewishness. He used the prevailing antiSemitic stereotypes as a handy way to characterize his play's villain. What mattered to Shakespeare was that Shylock was an outsider set apart from society because of his religi n, his profession of lending money for interest, and his hatred for Antonio and the other Christian characters of the play.

Many of the most powerful works in nineteenth and twentiethcentury literature deal with the predicament of an individual who, for one reason or another, finds himself out of step with society. It is important to realize that this was not necessarily Shakespeare's point of view. The English of the late sixteenth century believed that Christianity was the only true religion and that the social order was ordained by God. The individual who set himself against the establishment could only be a source of disruption or, at worst, evil. Shylock's behavior during the trial scene (Act IV, Scene I) shows us another reason why Shakespeare cannot have intended him to be a true tragic hero. A tragic hero would pursue his drive for revenge at all costs to himself. But Shylock, when he learns that he might lose his own life if he sheds a drop of Antonio's blood, immediately backs down. Suddenly, he would be quite happy to have the loan repaid in money and forget all about his call for "justice." Many readers interpret that as the behavior of a weak and unprincipled man, not a hero.

Still, most readers agree that Shakespeare has granted Shylock a dignity and depth of character beyond what we expect of a comic villain. Shylock's motives may not be admirable, yet his character is realistic in a way that the characters of the evercheerful, untroubled Bassanio and Portia are not. It is impossible to listen to Shylock speak the lines which begin "Hath not a Jew eyes?" without recognizing something of ourselves in him. We feel the sting of Shylock's passion for revenge, and the sourness of his contempt for the Christians who have tormented him. Shylock even speaks differently from the other characters in the play. He seldom resorts to poetic imagery. His sentences are short and choppy, emphasizing that he is cut off from the others. At times, he almost spits out his words.

The majority view of Shylock is that the contradictory sides of his nature were written into the part by the dramatist. Surely, in a play about the virtue of mercy it is essential that the audience should be able to see the villain's point of view and accept him as a fellow human being, however wrong or evil his actions might be. In fact, the "debate" about Shylock is not so much a debate about the character himself as about the way the others in the play treat him. Whether Shylock receives mercy or « is the victim of a group of selfish, narrowminded opponents is a question you will ultimately have to answer for yourself.