The Jew on Stage and on the Page: Intertextual Exotic

This essay considers the representation of Jewish characters and Jewishness in two lesser-known nineteenth-century British plays -- The Jew of Arragon; or, The Hebrew Queen by Thomas Wade, and Fazio by Henry Hart Milman. The plays are analysed in both textual and performance contexts, and in relation to debates about Judaism in British Romantic literature. The essay argues for a strong intertextual dimension in these dramatic representations of racial and cultural otherness, connecting Wade's and Milman's writing to key cultural reference points such as Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, Edmund Kean's performance of Shakespeare's Shylock, and William Hazlitt's groundbreaking review of this event.