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

ELH - English Literary History

Volumn 69, Issue 3, 2002, Pages 599-616

  Campos, Edmund Valentine ^a  

^a SWARTHMORE COLLEGE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950477225     PISSN: 00138304     EISSN: 10806547     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/elh.2002.0023     Document Type: Review

References (33)

1. Although the Lopez-Shylock theory was made popular by Sidney Lee in "The Original of Shylock," Gentleman's Magazine, 1880, 185-220,
2. the idea was first suggested by Frederick Hawkins in "Shylock and Other Stage Jews," The Theatre 1, November 1879. Later, Horace Furness observed what he thought to be a textual allusion to the public spectacle of Lopez's execution in Gratiano's court room ravings against Shylock: Thy currish spirit Governed a wolf, who - hanged for human slaughter - Even from the gallows did his fell soul fleet, And whilst thou layest in thy unhallowed dam Infused itself in thee: for thy desires Are wolfish, bloody, starved and ravenous. The Merchant of Venice, ed. M. M. Mahoud (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987), 4.1.133-38. Given that "wolf was capitalized in the quarto edition, what Furness perceived was a clever (or obscure) pun on proper names: "lupus" (Latin for wolf) evoked "Lopez," which was alternatively spelled "Lopus" in the period.
3. As Joseph Shapiro explains, efforts to rewrite Jews into the history of Shakespeare's England by prominent Anglo-Jewish historians like Lee and Lucien Wolf have fixed Lopez with an exclusively Jewish identity. Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1996), 173.
4. Robert Cecil, A True Report of Sundry Horrible Conspiracies of Late Time Detected to Have (by Barbarous Murders) Taken Away the Life of the Queens Excellent Majesty (1594), E.S.T.C. S105447.
5. G. K. Hunter, "Elizabethans and Foreigners," Dramatic Identities and Cultural Tradition: Studies in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1978), 27.
6. Hunter, 24.
7. See also Kim Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1995);
8. and Ania Loomba, Gender, Race and Renaissance Drama (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1989).
9. Lynda Boose. "'The Getting of a Lawful Race': Racial Discourse in Early Modern England and the Unrepresentable Black Woman," in Women, "Race," and Writing in the Early Modern Period, ed. Patricia Parker and Margo Hendricks (London: Routledge, 1994), 35-54.
10. Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, 4.1.170.
11. See Avraham Oz, "'Which Is the Merchant Here? And which the Jew?': Riddles of Identity in The Merchant of Venice," in Shakespeare and Cultural Traditions, The Selected Proceedings of the International Shakespeare Association World Congress, Tokyo, 1991, ed. Tetsuo Kishi, Roger Pringle, and Stanley Wells (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1991), 155-72.
12. See also Henry Charles Lea, A History of the Inquisition in Spain, vol. 2 (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1906), 285-312.
13. Etienne Balibar, "Is There a Neo-Racism?" in his Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, trans. Chris Turner (1988; reprint, London: Verso, 1991), 23.
14. Gonsalvo Añes was in charge of securing Antonio with stores and ships for a planned attack on his native land. Alvaro Mendez, based in Constantinople, and Lopez's father-in law Dunstan Añes provided additional financial and political aid. See Wolf, "Jews in Elizabethan England," in Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society, 1924-1927, vol. 11 (London: Spottiswoode, Ballantyne and Co., 1928), 24.
15. David S. Katz, Jews in the History of England, 1485-1850 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 89.
16. The ambivalence of the situation is best expressed in the distribution of letters of mark (privateering licenses) in the 1580s. Not only did English pirates working under English letters of mark attack both Spanish and Portuguese ships, other Englishmen flew the flag of Dom Antonio with letters allowing them to attack only Spanish ships. When it came to political alliances, the English would fly any flag that would allow them to attack anything. See Pauline Croft, "English Commerce with Spain and the Armada War, 1558-1603," in England, Spain and the Gran Armada, 1585-1604: Essays from the Anglo-Spanish Conferences London and Madrid 1988, ed. M. J. Rodriguez-Salgado and Simon Adams (Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers Ltd., 1991), 240.
17. Letter from Francis Walsingham to William Harborne, English ambassador to Turkey, reprinted in Wolf, 57.
18. For a detailed historical account of the Lopez conspiracy, see Martin Hume, Treason and Plot (London: Eveleigh Nashe, 1908).
19. C.S.P. Domestic, 462.
20. George Carleton, A Thankfull Remembrance of Gods Mercie (1630), S.T.C. 4643, 173.
21. Carleton, 164.
22. See also John Gross, Shylock: Four Hundred Years in the Life of a Legend (London: Chatto and Windus, 1992), 14.
23. Cecil Roth, History of the Jews in England (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1941), 140.
24. Simon Adams, "The Outbreak of the Elizabethan Naval War Against the Spanish Empire: The Embargo of May 1585 and Sir Francis Drake's West Indian Voyage," in England, Spain and the Gran Armada, 45.
25. See Wolf.
26. Roth, 158.
27. Walter Cohen, "The Merchant of Venice and the Possibilities of Historical Criticism," ELH 49 (1982): 767-78.
28. Thomas Lodge, An Alarum Against Usurers (1584), E.S.T.C. 16653.
29. William Haughton, Englishmen For My Money, or A Woman Will Have Her Will, ed. Albert Croll Baugh. Hereafter cited parenthetically by line number.
30. Roth, 144. This meeting is recorded in Coryat's entry in Samuel Purchass's Purchass His Pilgrimes.
31. A. J. Hoenselaars, Images of Englishmen and Foreigners in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries: A Study of Stage Characters and National Identity in English Renaissance Drama 1558-1642 (London: Associated Univ. Press, 1992).
32. Shapiro, 174.
33. Mary Janell Metzger, "'Now by My Hood, a Gentle and No Jew'": Jessica, The Merchant of Venice, and the Discourse of Early Modern English Identity, PMLA 113 (1998): 52-63.