t Drury Lane, February 14,
1741--- wore a red hat, a peaked beard, and a loose black gown, playing
Shylock as a serious, almost a tragic part, and laying great emphasis
upon a display of revengeful passion and hateful malignity. So terrible
was he, indeed, that persons who saw him on the stage in that character
not infrequently drew the inference and kept the belief that he was
personally a monster. His look was iron-visaged; the cast of his
manners was relentless and savage. Quin said that his face contained not
lines but cordage. In portraying the contrasted passions of joy for
Antonio's losses and grief for Jessica's elopement he poured forth all
his fire. When he whetted his knife, in the trial scene, he was silent,
grisly, ominous, and fatal. No human touch, no hint of race-majesty or
of religious fanaticism, tempered the implacable wickedness of that
hateful ideal. Pope, who saw that Shylock, hailed it as "the Jew that
Shakespeare drew"--and Pope, among other things, was one of the editors
of Shakespeare. Cooke, who had seen Macklin's Shylock, and also those of
Henderson, King, Kemble, and Yates, adopted, maintained, and transmitted
the legend of Macklin. Edmund Kean, who worshipped Cooke, was
unquestionably his imitator in Shylock; but it seems to have been Edmund
Kean who, for the first time, gave prominence to the Hebraic majesty and
fanatical self-consecration of that hateful but colossal character.
Jerrold said that Kean's Shylock was like a chapter of Genesis.
Macready--whose utterance of "Nearest his heart" was the blood-curdling
keynote of his whole infernal ideal--declared the part to be "composed
of harshness," and he saw no humanity in the lament for the loss of
Leah's ring, but only a lacerated sense of the value of that jewel.
Brooke, a great Shylock, concurred with Kean's ideal and made the Jew
orientally royal, the avenger of his race, having "an oath in heaven,"
and standing on the law of "an eye for an eye." Edwin Forrest, the elder
Wallack, E.L. Davenport, Edwin Booth, Bogumil Davison, and Charles Kean
steadily kept Shylock upon the stage,--some walking in the religious
track and some leaving it. But the weight of opinion and the spirit and
drift of the text would justify a presentment of the Jew as the
incarnation not alone of avarice and hate, but of the stern, terrible
Mosaic law of justice. That is the high view of the part, and in
studying Shakespeare it is safe to prefer the high view.

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