Destereotyping Shylock in Arnold Wesker's The Merchant

Abstract EN

Facing the serious existential question of whether it was still plausible to present the centuries-old Shakespearean stereotype of Shylock on world stages after the 1973 war with Israel, Arnold Wesker resorted to writing his version of the story of the contract between the Christian and the Jew.

Thus, Wesker’s The Merchant is not merely a destereotyping of the Elizabethan time villain but also a negotiation of the dominant discourse of the world classic The Merchant of Venice.

This paper studies Wesker’s negotiation of that dominant European discourse through a new historicist approach, which entailed the rewriting of the old story and the recreation of a new Shylock: a philanthropic old-aged Jewish hoarder of rare books instead of money and jewels who is compelled by the Venetian law to loan money for interest.

The destereotyped Shylock speaks against the historical Venetian laws that restricted Jews to work in usury as a large sum of its interest went to the Venetian treasury.