The appropriation of Shakespeare by the German educated middle classes is a well-known phenomenon. What perhaps is less well known is how often German theaters performed The Merchant of Venice. Andrew Bonnell points out that during much of the Imperial and Weimar periods, it ranked second or third among all the Shakespearean repertory in terms of the number of its performances. Against this background the author has chosen to look at the reception of Shylock in the hope of making a contribution to the study of German anti-Semitism. He follows the evolution of the role from the appearance of Shylock as a stock Jewish moneylender in the eighteenth century through the more psychologically nuanced performances on the late Imperial and Weimar stages. Actors playing Shylock had to decide which aspect of this ambivalent character to emphasize: the cruel, vengeful, and rapacious moneylender or the wronged father and victim of oppression, who pleads for his common humanity. Naturally some of the strongest performances stressed the ambivalence or drew connections between Shylock's vengefulness and his mistreatment by the Christian population. The role attracted many Jewish actors who often, although not always, depicted Shylock as a tragic, even noble figure amid the frivolous Venetian courtiers. Bonnell discusses other plays featuring notable Jewish male characters, particularly Nathan der Weise, and examines as well the stock role of the beautiful Jewish temptress, as in, for example, Hebbel's Judith. During the Weimar period, productions of The Merchant of Venice tended to be shaped by the growing polarization between a daring, modernist theater culture in the larger cities, and a more traditional, conservative provincial stage culture. After 1933 the play did not disappear from the repertory but the number of performances did decline. The regime, of course, approved of only one-sided depictions of Shylock, and several actors, among them Werner Krauss, obliged with crude caricatures. But Shakespeare's text resists such interpretations. Hence a bowdlerized version of The Merchant of Venice, stripped of any suggestion of Shylock's grandeur or humanity, was produced but never achieved any notable popularity. Nevertheless, Shylock was a sufficiently attractive target for the Nazis for Goebbels to plan a film of The Merchant of Venice in the last years of the war.

The author has certainly done a great deal of research and has a solid background in the history of German theater, but this was an ill-conceived project. Although he acknowledges the difficulties of studying the history of Shylock's reception, he does not really address the theoretical problems, let alone solve them. Much of the discussion relies on his reporting what a handful of critics wrote about the performances of an actor. Critic A liked a particular performance and stressed certain aspects of it; Critic B did not and emphasized other aspects. One never knows whether on a given night the opinions might have been reversed. Certainly the opinions of a handful of critics can never lead us to any idea of the reception on the part of the audience itself. Beyond that, the vague and too often incommensurable critical vocabulary deployed by different critics allows for very few meaningful comparisons. Hence the contrast between the different acting styles is often blurry, and it is hard to retain any distinct impression or draw any definite conclusions from these second- or even third-hand reports. This makes for tedious reading. Bonnell supplements this material with frequent statistical data on the number of performances but here, too, it is difficult to draw any interesting conclusions about the reception of Shylock among the German theater-going audience since this figure was affected by many extraneous factors such as the economic climate. In any case, the data would have been more usefully summarized in a graph or two. Nor, finally, is the author able to bring to life any of the rich characters who made the German theater in this period the most advanced in the world. People such as Max Reinhardt, Alexander Moissi, and Erwin Piscator, to name a few, remain colorless ciphers.

Consequently the contribution of this volume to our understanding of German anti-Semitism is decidedly modest. The author's suggestion that his work helps to refute Goldhagen's argument about pervasive eliminationist anti-Semitism stretches his evidence too far. At best, one can see in the reception of Shylock on the German stage an echo of the general ambivalence of Germans, including some of Jewish background, regarding the Jewish population living among them. But we knew this already.