Book Review: SHYLOCK IS MY NAME by Howard Jacobson

Shylock Is My Name by Howard Jacobson
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"When all you can remark is difference then all you are aware of is similarity."

Fresh from a theater workshop on THE MERCHANT OF VENICE, I eagerly read this second book in a series of Shakespeare reimaginings commissioned by Hogarth Press. This is my first Howard Jacobson book, and I suspect I would have appreciated it more had I read his other works first. Apparently, he is known for writing about Jewish characters.

MERCHANT is quite violent, both in speech and in the threatened actions. It's easy enough to imagine such barbarity in earlier times, but what about today?

Jacobson suggests that beneath this modern facade of civility lies that same ancient capacity for violence:

"They live with their nerve-ends exposed in this country... You can maim with a look, in this place. You can kill with a word... And as a consequence of that, he cannot judge what’s worth going to war for. So he goes to war, mentally, over everything."

I'm fully aware that, as a Filipino in Manila, there are so many references I barely grasp the enormity of. It's one thing to understand that a bris is the Jewish circumcision ceremony during infanthood (Jacobson's interpretation of Shylock's pound of flesh in the 21st century). It's quite another thing to seize upon its cultural weight.

In Jacobson's modern retelling, characters not only get modernized names, but entirely different characterizations and lines. Jacobson also throws in quotes from other Shakespeare works.

The box of gold, silver and lead become a Porsche Carrera, a BMW Alpina, and a Volkswagen Beetle. And still... Fathers raise rebellious daughters. Wealthy Christians judge their Jewish neighbors in an upscale neighborhood somewhere in the UK.

"There’s no violence a man is not capable of when he believes he is acting as God would have him act... It is rage not love that propels a man to action."

I think that, if one were to read this not knowing anything about the original play, it would be a very surreal and confusing experience indeed.

Honestly, I found the plot very convoluted in the worst possible way: that of an author very obviously following a script (which, in a sense, Jacobson was... but perhaps other authors would have made the manipulation less heavy handed).

There are moments of enlightenment, as when Jacobson adds modern concerns illuminating The Bard's older lines: "Whoever couldn’t afford to make provision for carers and nurses, whether they were necessary now or would be necessary in the future, was dirt poor. To avoid falling into the hands of the state was reason in itself for making money. One worked and earned in order not to die disgracefully. You take my life when you do take the means whereby I live…and the means whereby I hope to die as well."

I also loved Jacobson's take on light: "It isn’t good for you...to live in so over-illuminated a world. If I say you spend too many hours looking into screens I don’t want you to mistake me for a moralist or a Luddite. My only concern is for your aesthetic welfare. Light is to be cherished, in the way great painters like Leonardo and Caravaggio cherished it, as an illumination of meaning, as a way of distinguishing between the mundane darkness of things and the glow that can come with understanding and discrimination. You lose a sense of beauty and volume if everything is light."

Ultimately I'm glad I read the book, for it afforded me more time to ponder on that most magnetic character: Shylock. If one were to set aside the details of his Jewishness and cast him as whatever religion or subgroup in society is most marginalized, then one catches a glimpse of the play's transcendent power.

To classify him as a villain offhand is to miss the point of Shakespeare's masterpiece on the duality of man. The excitement of watching this play is that, depending on the actor/director, Shylock can be played with varying degrees as a sympathetic character (the abused becoming the abuser) or pure antagonist (the Other; the tool against which the majority define themselves and unite against).

This book is no substitute for the real thing, but as a continuation of one's Shakespeare education, it is well worth a few evenings' sweet moonlight.


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