Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Jews, Spaniards, and Portingales: Ambiguous Identities of Portuguese Marranos in Elizabethan England

2002; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 69; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/elh.2002.0023

1080-6547

Edmund Valentine Campos,

Sephardic Jews and Inquisition Studies

Could Elizabethan playgoers attend a performance of The Merchant of Venice (1596-1597) without recalling the bloody execution of the Queen's Jewish physician Roderigo Lopez? In 1594 Lopez, a Portuguese émigré, was indicted for conspiring with Spain to assassinate Elizabeth I, and after a tumultuous and prolonged trial he was publicly executed in the manner of traitors. In the wake of Lopez's death plays about Jews enjoyed a morbid popularity. Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta (1590) returned to the stage to profit from the anti-Semitism raised by the gruesome gallows scene, and two years after the event Shakespeare invented Shylock. The temporal proximity of the Tyburn spectacle to the writing of Shakespeare's play led Sidney Lee in 1880 to suggest that the Jewish doctor furnished the playwright with the prototype for Shylock, the assumption being that Lopez was the only contemporary, famous, and villainous Jew available to Shakespeare's literary imagination. 1 Since the publication of Lee's Lopez/Shylock theory it has been virtually unthinkable to investigate what has come to be known as the Jewish question in early modern England without considering the historical and cultural importance of the Lopez controversy. To be true, the scandal is helpful for understanding some aspects of Elizabethan anti-Semitism. At the same time, however, Lee's argument lacks the strong textual evidence necessary to definitively map Lopez onto Shylock. 2 Nevertheless, the specter of Lopez restlessly haunts nearly all modern editions of the play. The troubled legacy of Lee's topical [End Page 599] approach is that subsequent criticism tends to foreground Lopez's religious affiliation at the expense of other constituent factors of his profile. 3 For example, what Joyce's speculative meditation on Shakespeare's creative process omits in the above quotation is that Lopez was not only a Jew, but a foreign Portuguese outsider and the central figure of a major Anglo-Spanish conspiracy to assassinate the Queen.