Shylock's origins and evolution : the image of the Jew in English literature from the middle ages to the mid-seventeenth century

Durbach, Errol

Title: Shylock's origins and evolution : the image of the Jew in English literature from the middle ages to the mid-seventeenth century
Creator: Durbach, Errol
Subject: Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616 -- Characters -- Shylock
Subject: Judaism and literature
Subject: English literature -- Early modern, 1500-1700
Subject: English literature -- Middle English, 1100-1500
Date Issued: 1966
Date: 1966
Type: Thesis
Type: Masters
Type: MA
Identifier: vital:2322
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1014821
Description: [From Preface]. Any study centred in the exploratlon and analysis of the medieval and Elizabethen images of the Jew might, with some justification. seem redundant and impertinent to a modern reader; for the third quarter of this century has witnessed the almost total obviatlon of a great many such time-honoured images and symbols. The immemorial figure of the Wandering Jew, to cite a sIngle instance, has for the past two decades, attained his country and place of destination - history no longer condemning him to tarry until the Second Coming of the Messiah. Even the deicide Jew has been granted complete absolution, by an offlcial decree from the Vatican, for his complicity in the killing of Christ. It would seem, moreover, that the atrocities perpetrated against the Jews during the course of the Second World War have resulted in an alteration of the Jewish image radically transforming It from one of contempt into one of compassion a living symbol of "man's inhumanlty to man"; and the modern European dramatist has revived the Jewlsh figure on the stage as an instance of almost personal atonement or, alternatively, as a means of scourging the state of middle-class mind which abetted the persecution of the Nazi regime, attacking state policies of inactio and deploring the failure of influentlal powers to resist the blatant inhumanlty perpetrated within Its boundaries. Max Frisch's Andorre and Rolf Hochhuth's The Representative embody, each in its own way the 2Oth century's sense of shame and horror at those events with which the century has yet to come to terms. They are both extreme reactions agalnst the image of the Jew whlch the Nazi propogandized in the 1930s. And the image which the Nazis propogandized was curiously consistent wlth the medieval and Elizabethan images of the Jew.
Format: 194 p.
Format: pdf
Publisher: Rhodes University
Publisher: Faculty of Humanities, English
Language: English
Rights: Durbach, Errol

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