The Jews as Fathers. In the seemingly similar setup of the two plays, both Jews raise their beautiful daughters on their own. But whereas Barabas is fortunate to have Abigail, a faithful daughter who deserts her father only after he turns into a monster (that very monster who would later kill his own daughter), Jessica hates her father, elopes with her Christian lover, despises anything that is related to Judaism, converts, and even sells for a trifle her parents' precious ring. The price for the redemption of Shylock's daughter's life is paid already in Jessica's very first lines, "I am sorry thou wilt leave my father so: / Our house is hell" (MV II:3); whereas Barabas' daughter Abigail declares in her first scene, "Nor for myself, but aged Barabas, / Father, for thee lamenteth Abigail." (JM I:2), and her life ends when her vengeful father concocts the poison for his own flesh and blood, using imagery not to be found in Shylock's world:

The juice of Hebon and Cocytus' breath,
And all the poisons of the Stygian pool,
Break from the fiery kingdom, and in this
Vomit your venom, and envenom her
That, like a fiend, hath left her father thus!" (JM III:4)

The Jews' Heavenly Fathers. Though Barabas alludes in the former speech to Greco-Roman mythology, both he and Shylock refer constantly to biblical allusions (from the Hebrew Bible). But whereas Barabas wishes to take part in Patriarch Abraham's blessed fortune ("And thus are we on every side enriched; / These are the blessings promised to the Jews, / And [p. 170] herein was old Abram's happiness" JM I:1), Shylock's source of biblical inspiration, in relation to his loan to Antonio, is another patriarch, Jacob, who cunningly tricked his treacherous uncle Laban, and reaped an exceedingly high "interest" while working for him. Shylock alludes to a plot of trickery, usury, mistrust, profit: "When Jacob graz'd his uncle Laban's sheep, --" / (…) And thrift is blessing if men steal it not." (MV I:3, my emphasis). Shortly after the first scene, Barabas turns to yet another biblical figure, but this time he refuses to identify himself with the grand (almost tragic) and heroic Job and his acceptance of calamities and fate.(30) Shylock makes (as aforementioned) an insignificant exit, uttering his un-famous last words, "Send the deed after me, / And I will sign it," (MV IV:1) to be followed by an entirely Jewish-free romantic-comedic fifth act. Quite different from Barabas, who is given a heroic fall, and crashes with the final infamous acceptance of Job's fate and the poetic line "Die, life: fly, soul; tongue, curse thy fill and die! (JM V:4).(31)

The Reckoning and the Authors' Gift of Life. Since Barabas, earlier in that act, in a moment of realization of his imminent doom, reflects upon an Aesop fable,(32) it seems relevant to quote another of Aesop's fables, The Wolf and the House-Dog, a classic parable about the price of domesticity, that may be useful for Shylock's case:

A wolf, meeting a big well-fed Mastiff with a wooden collar about his neck asked him who it was that fed him so well and yet compelled him to drag that heavy log about wherever he went.

"The master," he replied.

Then said the wolf: "May no friend of mine ever be in such a plight; for the weight of this chain is enough to spoil the appetite."(33)

Levin provides an account of the price on the reckoning of the "taming of the Jew":

Between revenge and romance, between tragedy and comedy, The Merchant of Venice provides a Shakespearean compromise. It gives the benediction of a happy ending to the legend of the Jew's daughter; and it allows the Jewish protagonist, for better or for worse, his day in court. Legalism both narrows and humanizes [p. 171] Shylock, in contradistinction to Barabas, who for the most part lives outside the law and does not clamor for it until it has overtaken him. In rounding off the angles and mitigating the harshness of Marlowe's caricature, Shakespeare loses something of its intensity.(34)

Greenblatt, when he tries to imagine a poet's reaction, believes that Shakespeare's insight into the images of the infamous Dr. Lopez's execution was in breathing life into the stereotype. "He wrote out what he imagined such a twisted man, about to be destroyed, would inwardly say: 'I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes?'"(35) But whereas the Bard of Stratford definitely endowed his Jew with life, a petty life, his predecessor, as Gross sums it up, bestowed upon his own Jew a great deal more: "it is hard not to feel that Marlowe put a good deal of himself into Barabas – his power fantasies, his dynamism, his scorn for received opinion."(36)

Was Shakespeare's motivation in the domestication of "The Jew" derived from his fundamentally more refined attitude, or did he wish to fit the illimitable savage into the paradigm of the pound-of-flesh story? In perspective he succeeded, indeed, in creating a character of a Jew, who is still controversial, yet is tame or human enough to be reinterpreted and tolerable in the theater. He definitely gave enough life to "The Jew" to make him more than a clownish cliché. However, Marlowe, though creating a monster that is larger than life, and in many ways too hard to handle, gave his own creation significantly more. As Levin notes, Barabas, like his namesake of the New Testament, is an insurrectionist, and Marlowe takes his side.(37) The hypothetical question that remains unanswered is whether all the above-discussed trimmings (from Barabas to Shylock) were necessary, or if, perhaps, by robbing "The Jew" of his given magnificence and poetic self, poetic justice was indeed attained. Perchance Shakespeare strove to perform his operation of the scaling-down of "The Jew" according to Portia's (as Doctor Balthazar) guidelines: an operation that is to involve no shred of excess flesh and not a single drop of blood. Such a complex operation also leaves a lot less room for awe, as well as for commiseration or compassion for "The Jew." Shakespeare, artfully and humanely, succeeded in shrinking Marlowe's fire-spitting dragon, and ended up with the one who calls himself a rat.

Endnotes

1. When I use capital T in "The Jew," it refers to the generic or stereotypical concept, rather than the particular character.
2. Martin D. Yaffe, Shylock and the Jewish Question (Baltimore, London: The Johns Hopkins University press, 1997) 24. My emphasis.
3. John Gross, Shylock, A Legend and Its Legacy, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992) 21.
4. Christopher Marlowe (N. W. Bawcutt, ed. and intro.), The Jew of Malta (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990) 1.
5. Title page, ibid.
6. The title on the first Quarto from 1600 was "The most excellent / Historie of the Merchant / of Venice. / Vvith the extreame crueltie of Shylocke the Iewe (…)." William Shakespeare (John Russel Brown, ed. and intro.), The Merchant of Venice (Walton on Themes, Surrey: Arden Shakespeare, [1955] 1997) xi.
7. John Mitchell, Who Wrote Shakespeare? (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996) 227-40.
8. Gary Taylor, "Shakespeare Plays on Renaissance Stages." In Stanley Wells and Sarah Stanton (eds.) The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Stage (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 11. The use of "jew" with a small case (as a generic term) is Taylor's.
9. On Lopez: James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996) 36; and several others.
10. On the Nasi legacy: Cecil Roth, The House of Nasi: The Duke of Naxos (New York: Greenwood Press, 1948). On the Sources that were available to Marlowe: Bawcutt's introduction, Christopher Marlowe (N. W. Bawcutt, ed. and intro.), The Jew of Malta (Manchester: Manchester University Press, The Revels Plays, 1990) 7.
11. Shakespeare, most likely, relied on the 1587 version from Rome. A detailed list of various versions of the tale is listed in "The Shylock Legend, 1200-1587" in Jacob Rader Marcus (Mark Saperstein, ed. and intro.), The Jew in the Medieval World, a Source Book: 315-1791 (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, [1938] 1999) 421-427. The origins of names of other Jews mentioned in both plays is interesting, but irrelevant for this comparative project.
12. Barabas of the New Testament is the thief whose life was spared while Jesus Christ was crucified. The names of the other three leading Jewish characters in both plays are also inspired by biblical sources. Shylock, coined by Shakespeare, could refer to the city of Shiloh, in which the Ark of the Covenant was installed before King David built Jerusalem as the Capital; biblical Abigail (Barabas' daughter, the literal meaning of the name is "father of joy") is a married woman who betrays her husband, Naval (villain) the Carmelite, and marries the young rebel David; and Jessica's name could be derived from Jesse, David's father. A summary and further suggestions for the sources of names in MV in Joan Ozark Holmer, The Merchant of Venice: Choice, Hazard and Consequence (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995) 28, 70, 78, 86, etc. JM quotations are from Christopher Marlowe (N. W. Bawcutt, ed. and intro.), The Jew of Malta (Manchester: Manchester University Press, The Revels Plays, 1990). MV quotations are from William Shakespeare (John Russel Brown, ed. and intro.), The Merchant of Venice, the Arden Shakespeare (Walton on Themes, Surrey: Arden Shakespeare, [1955] 1997). Harry Levin, in The Overreacher, quotes several additional Shakespearean-Marlovian cross-references, and suggests that "[t]hough the cross reference seems to bring out the worst in both Shakespeare and Marlowe, it manages to be characteristic of both." Harry Levin, The Overreacher: A Study of Christopher Marlowe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952) 63, 68.
13. T. S. Eliot insists upon regarding The Jew of Malta as a wild farce. T. S. Eliot, "Christopher Marlowe." in Selected Essays. London: Faber and Faber and Harcourt, Brace and World Inc., 1964.
14. Joseph Jacobs and Edgar Mels, "Barabas," in Jewish Encyclopedia (New York: 1901-1916. www.jewishencyclopedia.com); Taylor, ibid.
15. Ellen Schiff, From Stereotype to Metaphor: The Jew in Contemporary Drama (Albany: State University of new York Press, 1982) 11.
16. See Paul H. Kocher, "Marlowe's Atheist Lecture," in The Journal of English and Germanic Philology (XXXIX), Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1940.
17. As defined by Schiff, 7.
18. Yaffe, 24-5.
19. JM is rarely produced nowadays. In the second half of the twentieth century, for instance, the Royal Shakespeare Company mounted only two productions of the controversial play. An interesting account of a nineteenth century high quality stage realization of Barabas by Edmund Kean (who portrayed the Jew as a sympathetic figure) can be found in Levin, 63.
20. The Argosy is the "state of the art" ship, an audacious, innovative, fashionable name, which was coined in the Ragusa seaport. Argos, in Greek mythology, is Jason's ship, upon which he sailed in search of the Golden Fleece, received a magic potion from the witch Medea, with which he reaped the lethal warriors who grew out of dragon's teeth, married Medea, and after deserting her she slew their children. Several references to various motifs of the myth (from greed to child sacrifice) are found in both plays.
21. On Marlowe's secret service career and Holland adventure: Charles Nicholl, The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe (London: Jonathan Cape and Picador, 1992) 234-9.
22. Stephen Greenblatt, "Shakespeare's leap," In The New York Times. 9/12/2004.
23. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (New York: Atheneum, [1957] 1967) 34-5.
24. Jeffrey Masten, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) 64-7.
25. Gross, 19-20.
26. Levin, 186.
27. Harley Erdman, Staging the Jew: The Performance of an American Ethnicity, 1860-1920 (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1997) 22-3.
28. Silent, in order not to add any lines to Shakespeare's verse (according to the unwritten twentieth century convention, that allows cuts but permits no additional text in Shakespeare stage and screen productions).
29. Michael Radford (dir., screenplay), The Merchant of Venice, USA: 2004.
30. Levin suggests another biblical connection to Barabas: his dozen murders are revenges according to the biblical "an eye for an eye" commandment. Levin, 59.
31. Compare to Job 2:9: "Curse God and die."
32. "For he that liveth in authority, / And neither gets him friends nor fills his bags, / Lives like the ass that Aesop speaketh of," (JM V:2).
33. Fables of Aesop, http://oaks.nvg.org/fam.html.
34. Levin, 72.
35. Greenblatt, New York Times.
36. Gross, 21. My emphasis.
37. Levin, 64.

[p. 172]

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