Where Did Shylock Get His Name?

In a speech in Des Moines, Iowa last Thursday, Donald Trump raised a rumpus by referring to unscrupulous bankers as “shylocks.” Before pondering the propriety of his doing so, however, I found myself wondering what made Shakespeare choose “Shylock” for the name of the Jewish moneylender of The Merchant of Venice. It’s hardly a Jewish name, nor was it one in the late 1590s when he wrote the play. In fact, it wasn’t an actual name at all. What gave Shakespeare the idea for it?

Nobody, it turns out, really knows. Shakespeare may have been influenced by the name Sherlock, which goes back as a surname to medieval England (it comes from old English scir, “bright,” and locc, “lock of hair”) but has always been rare as a given name, the popularity of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes detective stories notwithstanding. Even if so, however, this only pushes the question back a step. Why would Shakespeare, in naming his character, have thought of “Sherlock”—and if he did, why change its “Sher-” to “Shy-”?

None of the guesses that have been made make much sense. One of them, for instance, is that Shakespeare was playing on “sidelocks,” a word that already existed in 16th-century English, although there is no indication that it was used, as it is today, to describe the peyot of some observant Jews. Nor were such sidelocks grown by any Jews whom Shakespeare might have known, since the only Jews then living in England, from which Jews were officially barred until the mid-17th century, were a small group of semi-clandestine descendants of Marranos who did what they could to conceal their Jewish identity. There was simply no reason for Shakespeare to have associated sidelocks with Jewishness.