Leaving the House of Judaism

Janet Adelman (Blood Relations) devotes an interesting chapter to analyzing Lancelot’s departure from Shylock’s house, and his strange reunion with his father Gobbo, in Merchant of Venice. Lancelot has been Shylock’s servant, but he has had enough and, like Shylock’s daughter Jessica, he leaves for the home of a Christian. Shakespeare devotes what seems to be inordinate space to this odd, comic side plot. Adelman thinks, as usual, there’s method.

For starters, Lancelot’s departure is a virtual conversion: “since Lancelot tells us that he is ‘a Jew’ if he serves the Jew any longer (2.2.99–100), his leaving Shylock’s service is itself a kind of mock conversion from Jew to Christian, as though he were parodying Jessica’s conversion before the fact.” His “conversion” also anticipates Shylock’s forced conversion at the end of the play.

Lancelot engages in a debate between his conscience and the fiend, the former arguing that he stay and the latter urging him to leave. Why should leaving be so difficult, more difficult, apparently, than for Jessica? Adelman notes that “all Christians can in effect be read as converts from an originary Judaism they must disavow, figured as a father they must deceive in order to secure a blessing they do not deserve.” His departure is fraught with guilt because “it reiterates in miniature the originary scene of conversion from Judaism to Christianity—and because guilt toward the father and anxiety about his lineage crucially frame that larger scene of conversion. . . . Lorenzo’s apparently throwaway characterization of Shylock as ‘my father Jew’ is resonant in part because Judaism is commonly figured as the father to Christianity.”

It’s fitting, then, that in leaving his “father” Shylock the Jew, Lancelot should encounter his actual father, Gobbo (Italian name for Job), blinded (like Isaac) and carrying a basket of doves (!!).