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Celebrity Shylock

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Emily Hodgson Anderson
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Abstract

This essay proposes the celebrity of fictive bodies and seeks to understand how, and how far, certain fictional characters can stimulate an audience response analogous to that elicited by the flesh and blood. One of many “celebrity characters,” Shylock is useful to this discussion in regard to the historical development of his fame: Shylock on the eighteenth-century stage begins a new kind of fascination with this character. Seeking to explain that fact, the essay outlines aspects of eighteenth-century theatrical practice that enabled audiences to consider character apart from actor and then, to showcase this shift, develops two valences of the eighteenth-century response to Shylock—the tendencies toward judgment and conversion. Both responses demonstrate how a dramatic character invokes (and complicates) the tensions between public and private life that theorists have used to define celebrity appeal.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 126 , Issue 4: Special Topic: Celebrity, Fame, Notoriety , October 2011 , pp. 935 - 949
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2011

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