That said, The Serpent of Venice is set in medieval times, three hundred years before Shakespeare’s play, and conditions were quite different. Jews in Venice were required to wear a yellow hat, and there were stricter controls on what they were able to do with property. Across Europe, Jews were persecuted; the reference to the burning of the Jews at York is true. All Jews were expelled from England in 1290, and from France in 1306. The plagues of the time were often blamed on Jews, as well as the failure of crops, and they were accused of poisoning wells, no doubt an early application of statistical medicine linking cholera to water, with Jews as the scapegoat. In short, it was tough being a Jew in the Middle Ages, so Shylock in my setting would have to be tough, resilient, and resourceful, or at least have an advocate who was.

I also found it interesting to insert a Jew into the context of a holy war between Christians and Muslims, basically over who would occupy Jerusalem. By seniority, of course, the Jews get Jerusalem, but Shylock never inserts himself into that dialogue. He’s just trying to get by, and be faithful. The contrast of vengeance and mercy in the trial of The Merchant of Venice is obviously Shakespeare doing a compare and contrast between the Old Testament God and the New Testament Christ, but he’s completely ducking the religious question of his time, which was between the Catholics and the Protestants. (Elizabeth was adamantly Protestant, while her successor, her cousin James I, was Catholic, and Shakespeare had to write to please both of them, as Elizabeth died at the midpoint of his career.)

So, was Shakespeare an anti-Semite? I don’t think so. I think he was writing for his audience, just as I write for my readers. (Interesting, I think, that Shylock is referred to as “the Jew” twenty-eight times in the play, and by his name only three.) And neither do I think he was racist, but race is definitely an issue in Othello.

The person who mentions Othello’s color most often is Othello himself, referring to himself as “black” a number of times, and professing often how rough his manners and speech are in very poetic prose. Brabantio is completely out of his mind about Othello’s race, and Iago and Rodrigo whip him into a frenzy at the beginning of the play by talking about the “black ram tupping his white ewe” and using other racist ways of saying that a black guy is bonking his daughter. After the play leaves Venice, however, and proceeds to Cyprus, the racism settles down and Iago just hates Othello because he hates everyone. It was very difficult to not put the word sociopath in Pocket’s mouth when referring to Iago, but I had to settle for lunatic. For Iago, Othello’s race pales in comparison to so many other reasons to hate and undermine the Moor.