Howard Jacobson reimagines Shakespeare in My Name is Shylock

Howard Jacobson’s novel is set in Cheshire’s Golden Triangle, where class-wealth tensions recall 16th-century Venice.

There’s more comedy in Howard Jacobson’s My Name is Shylock than in The Merchant of Venice. Picture: Getty Images

The Merchant of Venice might be the least funny of the comedies in Shakespeare’s First Folio. Given the ambiguity of the play’s resolution, many scholars question whether it is a comedy at all. Beyond the destruction of Shylock, neatly wrapped up by the end of Act 4, the marriages show little promise (there are hints Jessica and Lorenzo’s might already be unravelling) and the merchant of the title, Antonio, seems destined to remain a lonely figure. While anything but unanimous in their condemnation of Shakespeare as anti-Semitic, most contemporary critics agree the play is. So the text presents a formidable challenge to Booker Prize-winning Jewish author Howard Jacobson.

Shylock is My Name is the second book in Hogarth’s series of Shakespeare reimaginings, following The Gap of Time, Jeanette Winterson’s take on The Winter’s Tale. Jacobson’s novel is set in Cheshire’s Golden Triangle, a picturesque corner of northwest England, where the new money of footballers and celebrities runs afoul of old — class-wealth tensions oddly consonant with 16th-century Venice.

Theatregoers remember Shylock long after forgetting the cleverness of Portia, the names of the wastrel suitors, or Antonio — who, as Auden argued, really “hazards all”. Jacobson both resurrects Shakespeare’s character and gives us his contemporary double in the figure of art collector Simon Strulovitch: “a rich, furious, easily hurt philanthropist with on-again off-again enthusiasms”. His initials are perhaps a reminder that to be a Jew post-1945 is to live with the Holocaust. From their first meeting in a Manchester cemetery — where Strulovitch mourns his mother, and Shylock his wife, Leah — Strulovitch invites him to stay in the house he shares with his second wife, disabled by a stroke, and Beatrice, his wayward daughter. The two rarely part company from there.

The “richly left and richly independent” Plurabelle (aka “Anna Livia Plurabelle Cleopatra A Thing Of Beauty Is A Joy Forever Christine Shalcross”) quickly bins her father’s short answer test for the ideal partner. The hapless suitors are dispatched in less than a page when Plurabelle attends a swingers party in the guise of a Formula One driver: “jiggling the keys to each of her cars — a Volkswagen Beetle, a BMW Alpina and a Porsche Carrera”. Unfamiliar with the workings of folklore, the men miss the obvious hint and fight over the cars. After bouts of experimentation, cosmetic and reversal surgery, Plurabelle stars in her own reality TV show The Kitchen Counsellor and initiates “a live interactive webchat facility called Bicker”.

The other “Christian” characters are condensed into three. The anti-Semitic aesthete D’Anton plays a part akin to Antonio but also the role of a Nerissa-like confidant. Gratan Howsome (a lower league footballer ­famous for giving a Nazi salute) and Barney (Plurabelle’s beautiful but doltish lover) share the role of Bassanio. Howsome functions too as Lorenzo and Bassanio’s boorish companion Gratiano. For Strulovitch, they represent the first generation “that came into the world without memory”.

Shylock and Strulovitch are the novel’s centre of gravity. Their characters give a sense of what it is to live with 5000 years of history and tradition, challenging neat divisions between secular and sacred. While Shylock operates as Strulovitch’s Jewish conscience (whose feelings for Judaism are mostly off-again), he is a tangible presence who converses with others besides Strulovitch. In soliloquies and his conversations with Strulovitch, Shylock peels away centuries of interpretation: to temper, qualify and correct what has been distorted but also to invent, with the benefit of hindsight and history. The threat of castration looms over the court scene in Shakespeare’s play and St Paul’s injunction to circumcise the heart takes a brutally literal turn. Jacobson plays with such material while interrogating it. Shylock, who is well-schooled in the scriptures and Rabbinic teaching, discourses vigorously on the status of the law but also on mercy — he might quip (a la Hebrew scholar John Goldingay) that the second testament adds nothing new.

The conversations between Shylock and Strulovitch bring father-daughter relationships sharply into focus — it was a theme that obsessed Shakespeare throughout his career. Some of the book’s funniest flashbacks describe Strulovitch’s shadowing of Beatrice in her many amorous pursuits from age 13. Freud is invoked with good humour. Both Shylock and Strulo­vitch are portrayed as fathers who “love their daughters not wisely but too well”, echoing Othello’s justification for murdering Desdemona in the self-eulogising speech he delivers before his suicide. There are dozens more allusions where context is important, adding a game-like element for Shakespeare buffs.

Jacobson understands that Shakespeare’s is an elliptical art: that the spaces left by his remarkable concision are a key part of his characters’ magnetism. His fleshing out of Shylock/Strulovitch complicates where a lesser writer might simplify. His often spare dialogue is deft, and in the probing voice of the narrator, we witness his penchant for long, digressive sentences where qualifications are qualified and subordinate clause is stacked on subordinate clause, like a clown on a monocycle balancing an ever increasing number of plates — the higher the teetering stack, the funnier and more virtuosic.

Shylock is My Name is more comic than Shakespeare’s original but Jacobson’s humour is guided by a moral intelligence that doesn’t negate the tragic. He is resourceful and inventive in his handling of plot, with adroit deployment of a few red herrings. The denouement isn’t quite commensurate with his brilliant prose but, then, Shakespeare’s rehashing of old stories was never as good as his word.

Aidan Coleman is a poet and critic.