SOURCE: Yaffe, Martin D. “The Mistreatment of Shakespeare's Shylock.” In Shylock and the Jewish Question, pp. 1-23. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.

In the following excerpt, Yaffe argues against the conventional view that the depiction of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice is anti-Jewish.

The figure of Shylock is like some secondary figure in a Rembrandt painting. To look sometimes with absorption at the suffering, aging Jew alone is irresistible. But the more one is aware of what the play's whole design is expressing through Shylock, of the comedy's high seriousness in its concern for the grace of the community, the less one wants to lose the play Shakespeare wrote for one he merely suggested.

—C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy

In this book I analyze the figure of Shylock, the unfortunate Jewish villain in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. My immediate aim is to challenge the widespread presumption...