Was Shakespeare an antisemite or a hidden ally?

How is it possible that the world’s most consumed and admired writer, whose works encompass the human condition like no other, also created the antisemitic character named Shylock - a Jew who oozes greed and deceit, scheming murder and revenge, his soul deformed and heartless?

The Shakespeare scholar Harold Bloom concedes that “one would have to be deaf dumb and blind not to see the play is fundamentally antisemitic”, but argues that, despite the antisemitism of his time, Shakespeare’s irrepressible dramatic instincts have endowed Shylock with at least some noble qualities, and for this the author should be given credit.

Who is Shylock and do we really know him? We know the context in which the play was written; the widespread antisemitism and the brutal state censorship. Which raises a crucial question - was Shakespeare free to write what he wanted to?

If the effect of censorship had been considered by Harold Bloom or any others among the multitudes of Shakespeare experts, they would have found that Shakespeare was not an antisemite, but that he was forced to disguise Shylock’s real character to avoid the same fate as other writers of the time. Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Thomas Kyd, Thomas Nashe and Robert Green were each imprisoned, tortured or died for various violations of the censor's rules. The dots join themselves. Shakespeare could not openly portray Shylock as a Jewish hero defending his nation’s dignity because the censors would have taken this as a heretical and seditious threat to the existing order, punishable by death.

So if not openly, did Shakespeare secretly embed this forbidden story into The Merchant of Venice? Did he cunningly weave it into the script like many other heroes and martyrs did, writing under repressive regimes - like Vaclev Haval in his “Letters to Olga” written from prison to his wife after the Soviet repression of the ‘Prague Spring’, or like the dissident poets under Stalin, or currently in China, Turkey, Iran?

Annabel Patterson in Censorship and Interpretation opened the doors to re-interpreting Elizabethan literature. She concluded that it is impossible to interpret the writing of the Elizabethan period without knowing the conditions of censorship and the tricks that writers used to evade them. These tricks, which she calls “strategies of indirection”, include the use of allegory, metaphor, double meanings, puns, irony, subtle references and carefully constructed ambiguities. Writers even made a point by saying its exact opposite: whatever it took to avoid alerting the censor.

Deciphering the “indirections” in The Merchant, almost every scene takes on a new slant, and an over-arching conceit emerges; there are two Shylocks intermingled with each other, the historical Christian construct of the archetypal Jew, and the real “do we not bleed?” Jew.

The writing becomes a kind of sleight of hand, allowing those biased against the Jew to only see the version of Shylock they want to see, the one that confirms their bias. It was a high stakes gamble to disguise subversive messages in ways that still allowed some in the audience to get it.

One example is Shakespeare's referincing of the Roderigo Lopez affair, a Dreyfus-like trial in which converted Jewish physician Roderigo Lopez was found guilty of plotting to poison Queen Elizabeth I, just a year or so before the writing of The Merchant.

In Act 4, during the play’s trial scene, Gratiano curses Shylock’s “wolfish soul” and compares him to “the wolf who hanged for human slaughter”. A literate Elizabethan would have known that the Latin for ‘wolf’ is ‘lupus’, which puns on that infamous doctor’s name ‘Lopez’. By referencing the Lopez trial, the play set in Venice is suddenly dangerously close to home in London – just a poison chalice and a hangman’s noose away.

The play is, on one level, a re-telling of the Lopez affair, but the doctor's name is never mentioned. It was critical to avoid any too obvious association or sympathy for the Jew.

When Shylock accuses his tormentor with: “And what’s his reason? I am a Jew”, the words express the essence of Lopez’s tragedy and reference the fact that it was illegal to be a Jew in England. The author could not openly question the law or the verdict against the Jew. To avoid the same fate as Lopez, he must outwardly portray Shylock as the archetypal evil Jew and his accusers as righteous.

When Shylock proposes his Shylock’s crazy revenge, to cut out a pound of flesh from Antonio’s chest, he references the execution of Lopez, who was hanged, drawn and quartered, with pieces of his body strewn about the street. The conflation of this image with Shylock’s pound of flesh is Shakespeare’s grotesque representation of great moral failure – a failure of civilisation.

Of course most of the audience, would only see confirmation of their own beliefs. It’s not hard to imagine the famously rowdy audiences response to Gratiano’s reprising of the public call to “Hang the Jew!” This archetypal evil Jew would have found favour with the general Elizabethan audience, and the authorities, even if they had suspicions of an alterior motive, were less likely to object to the play if the audience was happy.

As Annabel Patterson’s research confirms, the censors were less likely to pay close attention if no one made a fuss, especially the nobility, the church or the crown. This was the unwritten rule the author must comply with to survive.

So why would an author take such a risk in the hostile anti-Jewish atmosphere following the Lopez trial? It seems almost inconceivable, unless he was motivated by some deeply personal connection.

My own conviction is that the real author was the English poet Emilia Bassano, the daughter of a part- Moroccan, Venetian-born converso. Both Bassano's father, the court musician Baptista Bassano, and Lopez, were converted Jews employed at the Royal Court. Both were part of a small community of conversos living in London. For a writer who must disguise her own identity as a woman and as a Jew, this issue was personal.

In The Merchant, Shakespeare exposes the hypocrisy of each of the Christian characters; each is complex and even admirable, yet gradually suspicion mounts that each is guilty of the very things they are accusing Shylock of.

The moralistic Antonio, Shylock’s main accuser, is himself greedy and corrupt and grooms the handsome young Bassanio. Bassanio is passionate and noble-minded yet schemes to marry the heiress Portia to clear his debts, jeopardising his best friend’s life. And Portia is delightfully eloquent and feisty but dodgy in her legal machinations and sinks her teeth in deeper as she waxes lyrical on “the quality of mercy”.

Each character stands to gain by accusing Shylock. Each hides his or her guilt by assuming an outward posture of Christian pietyso the audience is immersed in a timeless parody on the dynamics of self-righteousness.

Layer by layer the play goes beyond mere exposure of human foibles. Ultimately it dramatises the endemic acceptability of blaming the Jew – and how alluring this was for the characters when compared to facing their own moral failings. Conversely, Shylock is presented as the bad guy, the Christian idea of a Jew, while behind this mask he defends his nation and his own humanity asking “If you prick us, do we not bleed?”

Despite the play’s many references to Shylock’s specifically Jewish greed, there are multiple clues that money was never Shylock’s real concern – he refuses to be paid off at any price. Even in his cruellest speech, when he curses and wishes his daughter dead for stealing his gold and gemstones and eloping with a Christian, the real meaning is of necessity inverted. His murderous hatred towards his rebellious daughter Jessica, only makes sense when taken as the measure of his love.

The author could not openly portray Shylock as a loving father or evoke sympathy for him. His persecutors preach that love is the essential Christian attribute that Jews just don’t possess. The playwright has them insist on this repeatedly. Should we suspect that we are being offered a hint that, in Shakespeare's own words, they "doth protest too much"?

The playwright’s final strategic flourish to satisfy the audience and the censors is to contrive an ending which finds the Jew guilty and stripped of everything he values most: his daughter, his religion and his livelihood. This ending satisfies the maxim that Christian innocence depends on Jewish guilt.

But for those individuals who could see the flip side, it is justice itself that is on trial, and is convicted.

By opening up the allegorical meaning of The Merchant of Venice, the full depth and genius of the play is revealed. The writer turns the repressive effects of censorship to dramatic advantage – it becomes the story. The audience is immersed in a parody reflected in the mirror of antisemitism. What seemed to be a charming romantic comedy, albeit with the all-to-be-expected dash of racism thrown in for a bit of fun, becomes a disturbing satirical grotesque and a soul wrenching tragedy. The man, the culture and ultimately the fault-line in our civilisation is exposed.