Chapter Six -- Hate Crimes in The Merchant of Venice: Folk Devils and Scapegoats

Abstract

This chapter addresses the causes and effects of hate crimes in William Shakespeare's play The Merchant of Venice. Since World War II, literary critics have consistently noted, and bemoaned, the play's anti-semitism; most recently, Stephen Greenblatt has suggested that “hatred” is the theme of the play, a reading that puts the Jewish-Christian tensions in Merchant in conversation with the Arab-American tensions in modern terrorism. Merchant has therefore played an active role in recent religious and cultural studies, but the play has not been considered in the vocabulary of criminal justice, specifically that of “hate crime.” This chapter aims to fill this gap by looking at crime in Merchant through the lens of criminological theories such as Frank Tannenbaum’s “dramatization of evil” and Stanley Cohen's “folk devils.” I argue that Shakespeare, writing The Merchant of Venice in and against the tradition of revenge tragedy, made Shylock both a victim and the perpetrator of hate crimes, which makes hatred both the cause and effect of crime. On the one hand, moral entrepreneurs concerned with cultural prosperity can raise a moral panic that makes those identified as “others” into folk devils, effectively leading to hatred and hostility against those whose identities set them apart from the professed norms and values of a society. On the other hand, when the victims of hate crimes seek justice for the wrongs done to them, that justice is constitutionally not forthcoming from the society that made them into folk devils, and that justice must therefore be carried out by the individual him- or herself: in other words, that justice is enacted as revenge, and that revenge is sought not against the individual who committed the initial hate crime but against the society that created the folk devil in the first place. I locate this theory of hate crimes in a reading of Shakespeare's Shylock, a Jew who is spit upon and kicked just for being Jewish, and who attempts to murder his assailant in response. I also consider a modern case, the Boston marathon bombing of 2013, in which the perpetrators were motivated by revenge, not the desire to incite fear. As I conclude, a reading of The Merchant of Venice can provide us with new ways of thinking about the kind of crime commonly called “terrorism,” a kind of crime that is rarely about inciting fear, one that is usually about exacting revenge; it could be useful, with reference to the literary tradition in which Shakespeare wrote Merchant, to rebrand what is commonly called “terrorism” as “revenge tragedy.” Finally, the changes Shakespeare made to his sources, turning tragedy into comedy, offer us a way of thinking about persistence in and desistence from revenge, as I discuss with reference to the split fates of the two Tsarnaev brothers who committed the Boston Marathon bombing.

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