Aegis 2011
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Shakespeare’s Shylock: The Enthusiastic Fanatic >>> Hannah Biggs William Shakespeare is undoubtedly regarded as one of the best playwrights and poets of the English language. His plays have enraptured viewers and readers for ages with their three-dimensional characters, exquisite language, and accurate portrayals of human emotion, morality, and fallacy. Shakespeare gave incredible attention to the development of his characters; he made his characters’ struggles, inner turmoil, happiness, and expressions of love easy to identify with, even for readers and viewers today. The emotions of Shakespeare’s characters are so potent that one cannot but help to identify with the characters’ fictional struggles and joys. Such a timeless, potent character is Shylock from The Merchant of Venice. Despite many critics’ claims that Shylock is Shakespeare’s embodiment of the amoral, devilish Jew of 16th century Europe, few of these critics have defended that Shakespeare wrote Shylock’s character as an insight into the emotional struggles of a Jew facing prejudice, emotional abuse, and intense hatred from England’s powerful, preeminent Christians. Shakespeare gives Shylock’s character incredible depth—depth which lends insight into an altered mental state directing his actions, reactions, and skewed sense of morality. A closer psychoanalytical reading of Shylock’s behavior reveals that Shylock suffers from the so-called “intellectual defect” known as fanaticism (Passmore 213). Although Shakespeare would not have been aware of the actual classification and naming of such a psychological defect (Freud, Jung, Lacan, and Horney developed their theories long after Shakespeare’s death), Shakespeare was aware of human behavior and tendencies, behaviors he explored so well in this and other plays. The intense hatred Shylock feels from society and other characters because of his ‘Jewishness’ spurns this fanatic behavior that embodies itself in his intense hatred of Christians, his obsessive desire for revenge against Antonio, his narrowminded fixation on acquiring and sustaining wealth, the inability to feel sympathy for others’ struggles around him, and his insistent, passionate identification with his Jewish people. First, what is fanaticism? The modern-day definition varies between psychologists, sociologist, and philosophers. However, in order to give an accurate definition of this altered intellectual, emotional, and mental state, one must take into the account the historical context from which the term was first coined. The word, “originally introduced into English … to describe the Puritan sectaries, [has] its root in the Latin ‘fanum,’ meaning a place consecrated to a deity. From this the Romans themselves derived ‘fanaticus’ as originally meaning ‘inspired’—the ‘god-possessed’ … but later coming to mean ‘wild’ or ‘frenzied’ through its association with the worship of Cybele and Isis” (Passmore 215). Therefore, obsessive adherence to a religious dogma is a critical component of fanatical behavior. But, to give a more succinct definition of fanaticism, one must understand that “‘enthusiasm’ and ‘fanaticism’ … were for a time, synonyms.” John Locke explains this overlap in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Passmore 211). Knowing this, psychoanalytical critics of Shylock’s behavior must also look at dated documents describing the phenomenon of enthusiasm with an understanding that it is essentially the same disorder as today’s fanati-
