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Shylock Is Shakespeare

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This book is so far my favorite work of literary criticism in the twenty-first century, and I wholeheartedly recommend it both to literary critics and to those who are merely curious about what exemplary criticism is like. The reader of this book will notice that Gross's work has an unusual literariness, a poetic agility that is subdued almost to what it works in, like the dyer's hand. The book is filled with cryptic parables, fables, conceits, wild wordplay, false genealogies and etymologies, constant allusions, and even a soliloquy. The book is also wide-ranging in a way that much criticism is not: it offers discussions of a number of theatrical performances of the play and compelling discussions of Philip Roth, Heinrich Heine, and Marcel Proust as well as many other writers who have pondered the enigma of Shylock. Among other pleasures, the book also offers a playful fantasy of how Zero Mostel might have played Shylock.

Gross's prose has a syntactic signature which I find myself adopting in this sentence: in his long, beautifully arranged multi-clause sentences one finds, over and over, a string of appositive phrases or other modifiers, phrases which restate an idea, building on it, transforming it, and revealing its many-sided complexity and its inner contradictions. This stylistic trait has analytical and even ethical functions: Gross is an interpreter who suspects even his most compelling assertions of being too simple. I will cite just a few magnificent examples. Here is one: "It is difficult to describe the candor and incandescence of Shylock's stance, his frightening charisma, the way he magnetizes the courtroom even as he stands as an object of scorn." And here is another: "He puts claims for mercy and forgiveness to the test just by making himself so terribly unforgivable; he is as unforgivable as he is unforgiving, refusing the coercions of forgiveness, choosing against its seductive economy or profit (being as it is, in Portia's words, `twice blessed')." And here is another example: "Even if he is referring to a roasted pig, its mouth fixed open by the oven, the word `gaping' makes the thing seem half-alive, staring or taking in air, almost astonished."

This syntactical horn of plenty, this pouring forth of riches, is an appropriate stylistic anchor for a critic who writes on Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Not everyone in the twenty-first century values this kind of abundance, but early modern authors did, and they had a name for this element of Gross's style: they called it amplificatio. The amplificatio is slightly less obtrusive in Gross's Shylock book than in some of his previous work, and I see this reduction as the sign of an internal struggle. If Gross were an allegorical figure, I would be obliged to note at this point that it cannot be accidental that this subtlest of critics is named "Gross." I think that critics, and writers more generally, are often at their most interesting when they are trying to rein in their greatest strengths.

This brings me to my second task: a brief discussion of Gross's project as a critic. Gross is someone who is a Spenserian as well as a Shakespearean. What does it mean to read Shakespeare like a Spenserian? It might also be helpful to think of other critical centaurs, like Harry Berger, Jr., Susanne Wofford, and Patricia Parker. Shakespeareans often feel as if the plays have been thoroughly harvested, with room only for some small incremental gleanings. Spenserians, on the other hand, tend to feel as if every passage in Shakespeare opens up into nearly infinite new vistas. It is probably no accident that Gross, Harry Berger, and Patricia Parker have each written an entire book on a single play (although Professor Parker has, tragically, left hers in her desk drawer). These centaurs think differently than other Shakespeareans do, and there are few enough of them so that they each preside over a large domain. It is undoubtedly irresponsible to generalize about how Spenserians read Shakespeare, but I am tempted to say that what they do differently is to treat individual words as if they were dramatic characters. Or, to put it another way, Spenserians reading Shakespeare treat tropes as if they are people and people as if they are tropes.

Like Harold Bloom, Gross cherishes "All things counter, original, spare, strange." Gross, too, uses the word "uncanny" as a term of the highest praise: he loves opacities, inner darknesses, densities of meaning too compacted for interpretive unpacking. Gross, too, has a critical method that celebrates that which resists interpretation. The differences between Gross and his uncle-father or aunt-mother Bloom, though, are perhaps ultimately more significant than the similarities. When I reread Bloom's discussion of The Merchant of Venice, I was struck by how little close reading he does. Gross is far more interested than Bloom is in the verbal textures of the plays, in dimensions other than the characterological. Gross's Shylock is both a personage and a collection of verbal patterns, both a sentence-generating machine and a human being making an ethical claim on his interlocutors, trying to establish a common space within which a conversation can occur.

Kenneth Gross's Shakespeare Is Shylock is at once an intimate record of one scholar's reading experience and a wide-ranging interpretive engagement with one of Shakespeare's most troubling plays and its afterlife in later literature and thought. Gross is more interested in the fortuitous afterlives of Shylock in allusion, association, and accident than in fully developed recreations and performances, yet his pursuit of Shakespearean happenstance never decays into a mere network of puns and figures. Instead, Gross stays close to his two subjects: to Shylock as a character whose very incompleteness on the stage deposits pockets of mystery that lead us to imagine, inhabit, and reanimate his ambiguous person; and to Shakespeare as a dramatist who, Gross argues, is Shylock's "brother and other." Fiercely, even ardently committed to Shylock and his cause, Gross opens windows for his general readers onto the houndings and humiliations suffered by Renaissance Jewry. Even while tracking the suffering of the Jews, however, Gross absolutely refuses to participate in what he calls "sectarian readings, whether Jewish or Christian" (10). Although Gross does not dispute the anti-Semitism of Shakespeare and company, Shakespeare's ethical limitations give him absolutely no pleasure or power, and his own challenge remains discovering "what it means to keep faith with Shakespeare's fiction" (124): to understand the deep bonds between Shakespeare and Shylock without trying to "save" either creature or creator. To grasp those inadequacies and to find a satisfactory settlement with them is the ethical aim of this brave little book. This book is intimate without being personal. Rather than dipping into anecdote or memoir, Gross invites us to enter the generous and thoughtful circle drawn by nothing more nor less than the frank and assiduous unfolding of the interpretive process. Gross writes of Shylock that he "gives and hazards all the rage he has" (1). I would say of Gross that he gives and hazards all he has by way of literary investment, so that his readers can reap the interest without suffering either coercion or complicity.

This may not be the worst book of Shakespearean criticism ever written, but it ranks way up there among the most pretentious. Frequently spurning coherence, Gross regales the reader with endless, often forced parallels to Shakespeare and Shylock that apparently just pop into his mind from his own readings of other writers, ancient and modern. What this lack of intellectual discipline amounts to is less light shed on the author or central character of "The Merchant of Venice," and more on the reading habits of self-absorbed critic Kenneth Gross.

Kenneth Gross tells us nothing new about Shakespeare's play, Shakespeare the man, or Shakespeare the author. I was saddened to see Stephen Greenblatt's plug for this arrogant little tome as Greenblatt's book, "Hamlet in Purgatory," added greatly to my understanding of the theological implications of Shakespeare's Hamlet. Gross is merely self absorbed, most chapters ending with a trite little "quote" from the mind of Shakespeare, as interpreted through Kenneth Gross. Even more ridiculous is Gross's inability to even attempt to defend his thesis that Shakespeare was speaking through his character Shylock. His chapter about the caskets in the Portia subplot of The Merchant of Venice is particularly silly. And Gross typically gives weight to the current orthodoxy that Antonio was homoerotically enclined towards Bassanio. Criticism is essentially One Man's Opinion, but Gross has nothing new to say that's worth reading.