Emma Smith's Was Shylock Jewish?
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400 Years of Shylock:
Exploring Emma Smith’s “Was Shylock Jewish?”
“Was Shylock Jewish?” is the somewhat misleading title of Dr. Emma Smith’s 2013 article for Shakespeare Quarterly. The essay is an excellent example of new historic criticism laced with formalism that does not actually question Shylock’s ethnicity. Rather, Dr. Smith spends thirty-six pages applying her command of obscure academic terminology to argue that despite, “very little historical and archival basis” negative connotations and caricatures of Shylock, “have, as I demonstrate, become axiomatic in modern scholarship, particularly in the editorial apparatus of standard editions of the play” (Smith 189). Dr. Smith bases her thesis around the 1879 Henry Irving production