The Merchant of Venice

by William Shakespeare

  2. Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 1953: a snarling and spitting Michael Redgrave as Shylock with a warm and dignified Peggy Ashcroft as Portia.

  London’s National Theatre mounted two critically acclaimed productions in the later twentieth century, directed by Jonathan Miller (1970) and Trevor Nunn (1999), both subsequently televised. The two were closely related, both featuring a dignified Shylock integrated into a capitalist mercantile culture: other than his yarmulke, his costume in both identified him as a member of the Venetian community. This allowed the idea of his “outsider” status to be explored more subtly: Miller noted that by “allowing Shylock to appear as one among many businessmen, scarcely distinguishable from them, it made sense of his claim that, apart from his customs, a Jew is like everyone else.”16 Nunn followed this logic, as have many twenty-first-century directors of the play, such as Darko Tresnjak (Theater for a New Audience, 2007) and Tim Carroll (RSC, 2008).

  Miller’s production starred Laurence Olivier, whose key inspiration for his performance was Benjamin Disraeli. He dramatized the trials of an alien attempting to integrate himself into a new society, his abuses at Christian hands eventually unleashing a dignified and righteous rage. Henry Goodman’s Shylock in Nunn’s production was in a similar position, and emphasized the genial and fatherly aspects of the character: this was a good-natured and often humorous Shylock, whose trials were undeserved. For both Miller and Nunn, the key to demonstrating the insidiousness of racial prejudice was in setting the production in history recent enough to be uncomfortably familiar, but distant enough to provide a semblance of objectivity. Miller hearkened back to the late nineteenth century, while Nunn set his production in the 1930s. Both, too, used the character of Jessica to unsettle the harmony of Act 5. Miller made her “melancholy, not at all the giddy, venturesome girl one might expect,”17 and at the end she could be heard singing the Kaddish offstage as a lament to her lost father. Gabrielle Jourdan’s Jessica in the 1999 production was similarly discontented and closed the play by singing the same Yiddish prayer in a direct reference. Where the eighteenth-century star vehicles had relied on a tremendous Act 4 exit from Shylock to cast a pallor over the remaining scenes, Miller and Nunn’s use of Jessica established a quieter and more universal epitaph for cultures violently subsumed.

  A more recent trend in performance is to use the play as an exploration of male sexuality, often with the result of refocusing a production on the Merchant. Academics may argue that early modern platonic homosocial modes of behavior are easily confused with more modern understandings of homosexuality, but onstage it has become increasingly customary to explain Antonio’s melancholy through feelings of unrequited (or once-requited) love for Bassanio, often with the suggestion that his sexuality makes him as much of an outsider as Shylock’s religion does his. Bill Alexander’s 1987 RSC production (discussed below) extended the homosexual theme to include most of the Venetian characters, and Michael Dobson notes that in Nunn’s 1999 production David Bamber’s Antonio’s melancholy was occasioned by his “forlorn sexual yearnings for Bassanio [that] had long since been repressed.”18 Edward Hall’s 2008 production with his all-male company Propeller relocated the play to the fictional Venice Prison, an exclusively male environment where the “female” characters were drag queens. Hall’s production utilized Shakespeare’s text to explore various incarnations of male–male relationships, from the negotiation of power and control to the simply romantic.

  Despite Charles Edelman’s assertion in 2002 that “given the sensitivity of the play’s subject matter, it is very unlikely that [a major feature film] will ever be made,”19 a full-scale film emerged only three years later, directed by Michael Radford and featuring an all-star cast including Al Pacino (Shylock), Jeremy Irons (Antonio), and Joseph Fiennes (Bassanio). Where the larger-scale Victorian stage productions had attempted to recreate the splendor of Venice onstage, Radford filmed on location in Venice itself, using dark alleys, open promenades, and claustrophobic courtrooms to impressive effect. Setting the production in the Venice of Shakespeare’s time, Radford re-created the historical realities of Jewish life in the city, with Jews forced to wear red caps and live in ghettos. On television, as well as the screened versions of Miller and Nunn’s National productions, the 1980 version for the BBC Shakespeare series directed by Jack Gold offered a very human, but not entirely sympathetic, Shylock in the Jewish actor Warren Mitchell, and drew attention for the uninhibited sexuality of Lorenzo and Jessica.

  AT THE RSC

  If ever there was a time when we should be asking the questions about humanity, greed, the outsider’s place in society that are in this play it is now, in a time of decay.20

  Race, Bigotry, and Alienation

  The wrong question—“is it anti-Semitic?”—is always asked of The Merchant of Venice. The answer is: “only as far as is strictly necessary.” Ask another question—“is it offensive?”—and the answer is an unequivocal “yes.”21

  Whatever their race or religion, Jewish or Christian, Muslim or Hindu, a member of the audience watching The Merchant of Venice in modern times is going to feel slightly uncomfortable in their seat. There is no doubt that Shakespeare’s Jew is based on a stereotype, a vicious caricature of a little understood and much maligned race. How does a post–Second World War director tackle a play that links villainy with religion without being accused of racism? The answer, more often than not, has been to make the Christian characters equally, if not more, horrible than the Jew who decides their fate. Is this an imposition of modern times? Does it distort the nature of Shakespeare’s original intention? The questions surrounding these issues have made The Merchant of Venice the real “problem play” of our times.

  The playwright Arnold Wesker was compelled to give his opinion after going to see the RSC’s 1993 production directed by David Thacker, which proved one too many Merchants for him:

  The strongest evidence offered in support of the view that Shakespeare did not create a stereotype are those widely trumpeted lines which he gives to Shylock as special pleading for his humanity: “Hath not a Jew eyes? …” For [John] Gross, as for many others, it is a noble piece of writing. Not for me! Far from vindicating the play, the sentiments betray it—self-pitying, patronising, and deeply offensive. Implied within them is medieval Christian arrogance, which assumed the right to confer or withdraw humanity as it saw fit.22

  However, Shylock’s statement of common “humanity” is delivered with the express purpose of pleading his right to revenge, by very inhumane means. Taken out of context both this speech and Portia’s speech on mercy are wonderful statements of humanity; taken in the context of the play, however, they both echo with hypocrisy.

  Shylock, unlike the Christian characters in the play, stands as an embodiment of his race. Common Elizabethan myths about Jews, which interestingly included the use of human sacrifice, of Christian blood, in their rituals,* have directly influenced Shakespeare’s characterization. The true offensiveness of this negative stereotype is evidenced when real Jewish beliefs are taken into consideration:

  Jewish law includes within it a blueprint for a just and ethical society, where no one takes from another or harms another or takes advantage of another, but everyone gives to one another and helps one another and protects one another … We are commanded not to leave a condition that may cause harm, to construct our homes in ways that will prevent people from being harmed, and to help a person whose life is in danger. These commandments regarding the preservation of life are so important in Judaism that they override all of the ritual observances that people think are the most important part of Judaism.23

  The difficulty for any actor playing Shylock today therefore resides in the portrayal of the character’s Jewishness:

  A photograph in The Observer shows that Eric Porter’s Shylock [1965] was given bags under the eyes and a long hooked nose, while Emrys James [1971] depended for his repulsiveness less upon make-up than saliva. Described by one critic
as “… barefoot, robed in old curtains, with a mouthful of spittle …,” James was “a medieval Jewish stereotype in a large, baggy kaftan, with grey ringlets spilling from beneath his skull cap.” The same reviewer went on:

  This is a Jew straight out of the Penny Dreadful magazines, literally salivating at the thought of his pound of Christian flesh.24

  His individuality, his isolation from other Jewish characters in the play has also been emphasized to indicate that he is not the embodiment of a race but an individual aberration. In 1978 Patrick Stewart portrayed him as “a sour, loveless man, corroded by avarice, mutilated by money. Even his friend Tubal finds him faintly appalling.”25

  David Calder, in David Thacker’s 1993 modern dress production, had played Shylock as a fully assimilated Jew, indistinguishable from the Christians by his mode of dress. He wore a business suit right up to the crucial scene where he discovered Jessica’s elopement:

  Wishing Jessica, “hearsed at my foot and the ducats in her coffin” [3.1.86], Shylock tore open his shirt to reveal the Star of David underneath (as Antonio’s open shirt in the trial scene revealed a crucifix). By the trial scene, Shylock had turned himself into the image of a religious Jew, with skullcap and gabardine and with the Star of David now worn outside his collarless shirt. His use of the symbols of religion was now demonstrably an abuse of religion and race, becoming a Jew only because it focused his traumatised existence. It was Shylock himself who now appeared the anti-Semite … When Shylock announced “I will have the heart of him if he forfeit” [3.1.122–3], he put his hand firmly on an open book, a prayer book I presume, on his desk and Tubal registered horror at this abuse of religion.26

  Some critics worried that overt Jewishness was being once again linked with villainy, but the majority of them believed that Shylock’s change of costume signaled not only the character’s anger at, but acceptance of, his alienation, his exclusion from a culture which had only been tolerating and patronizing him. Calder stated: “He believes that any attempt to alleviate racial intolerance is actually a mockery and what he must do is to become more Jewish and assert himself in that clear way.”27

  Part of the attraction of Shylock as a character is the fact that he is an “outsider.” Like Othello, the question of whether he is a Jew or has black skin is important to a modern audience only in as much as it exposes the society from which he is estranged:

  Racism is as much part of our world as it was [Shakespeare’s]. The goal is not to sanitise or rehabilitate Shylock, but to see him as part of a society whose workings lead to cruel and outrageous acts.28

  In 1978 Patrick Stewart made a conscious decision to tone down Shylock’s Jewishness:

  Apart from the yarmulke, the only other distinctive garment was a yellow sash, twisted round the waist and only just visible beneath the waistcoat. The ritual-like garment and its wearing was an invention of the designer’s, though based on photographs of Russian Jews in the nineteenth century, who wore a yellow sash over a long frock coat. We wanted to avoid any excessive sense of Jewishness or foreignness in appearance but this detail, almost unnoticed in the earlier scenes could, in the court, be boldly worn over the frock coat as a proud demonstration of Shylock’s racial difference. In the early scenes, however, I was anxious to minimize the impression of Shylock’s Jewishness. Whenever I had seen either a very ethnic or detailedly Jewish Shylock I felt that something was lost. Jewishness could become a smoke-screen which might conceal both the particular and the universal in the role. See him as a Jew first and foremost and he is in danger of becoming only a symbol, although a symbol that has changed over the centuries as society’s attitudes have changed.29

  Stewart’s Shylock was in effect a “bad Jew,” totally motivated by money with little regard to the ethics of his religion. In this production the words “Jew” and “Christian” were merely labels, with neither set of characters demonstrating any of the traits of their creeds. Set in the late nineteenth century,

  The Christians are, on the whole, a spoiled, boorish bunch, much given to throwing bread-rolls, shooting off cap-pistols, and other types of horseplay; and the shock provoked by their deep, instinctive prejudice is the shock of recognition, because they wear the suits some of our generation’s grandfathers wore at public school or Oxbridge. The upper crust yob Gratiano, whose pet idiocy is dog-imitations, represents this faction at its most gruesome. And yet behind the witty, teasing front displayed by Patrick Stewart’s Shylock, there festers a no less nasty temperament …30

  One of the RSC’s most controversial productions, directed by Bill Alexander in 1987,

  3. Patrick Stewart as Shylock: not so obviously Jewish in appearance, but unashamedly motivated by money.

  grappled with the play’s offensive subject matter more daringly than any production in recent memory. Refusing to either rehabilitate Shylock as the play’s moral standard-bearer … or to treat him from a safe historical distance as a comic “Elizabethan” Jew … Alexander courted controversy, seeming almost to invite accusations of racism. The controversy sprang in part from his refusal to honour the distinctions between romance and realism, comedy and tragedy, sympathy for and aversion to Shylock, from which stage interpreters have traditionally felt they had to choose. By intensifying the problematic nature of the text, Alexander modulated the dynamics of audience response: he goaded audiences with stereotypes only to probe the nature of their own prejudices; he confronted them with alienation in different guises in order to reveal the motives of scapegoatism. His Shylock was grotesque—at once comic, repulsive, and vengeful. Yet he was made so in part by those Venetians who need someone on whom to project their own alienation; Venetians who, in their anxiety over sexual, religious, and mercantile values, were crucial to the transaction Alexander worked out between Shakespeare’s text and contemporary racial tensions.31

  Antony Sher, who played Shylock as a very exotic and very foreign-looking Jew, stated:

  There have been a lot of productions set in the turn of the century—or in the last century—where he’s dressed in a frock coat like everybody else and is an assimilated Jew. To me, that is nonsense, because clearly he sticks out like a sore thumb in society … We chose to make him a Turkish Jew using a Turkish accent. What we were doing with that was trying to extend the racism and by just making him a very unassimilated foreigner, very foreign, rather than very Jewish, we hoped to slightly broaden the theme of racism. We also wanted to make the racism as explicit and as brutal as described in the text, but never normally done. You don’t normally see Christians spitting at him or kicking him or doing all the things that he says they do.32

  The first appearance of Sher’s Shylock was of him

  turbaned, baggy-panted and first seen squatting cross legged on an ottoman in his black tent … Mr Sher’s Shylock also is tremendously volatile: when he describes “the work of generation” among Laban’s sheep, he pummels his left palm with his right fist in mimic procreation. When Antonio makes the fateful bargain, Mr Sher runs his hand over the outline of his body like a butcher sizing-up a carcass. There is nothing sentimental about this Shylock: he is out for blood. But you understand why, when Antonio picks up his abacus, hurls it to the floor and spits at his departing figure on “Hie thee, gentle Jew.” Too much? Not if you look at the text, which tells us that Antonio publicly calls Shylock a misbeliever and cut-throat dog at every opportunity. The trial scene is more exciting than I ever remember it. The appearance of this Shylock almost provokes a race-riot, with the Christians indulging in anti-Semitic chants. Tubal has even providentially brought a cloth with which his colleague can wipe the spit from his face. As Mr Sher prepares to extract the pound of flesh, he intones a Hebrew sacrificial prayer specially invented for this production.33

  In this volatile setting Shylock’s defiance almost represented “a perverted act of courage.”34 Nevertheless, Shylock was “not a tragic hero: he is proof that racism breeds revenge.”35 According to the critics, there was more spit in this production
than in any other before, or since. The spit directed at the Jew was an important symbol of hatred and returned in the trial scene in which

  Shylock is seen whetting his knife with his own spit. This image might well be the visual equivalent of his line: “The villainy you teach me I will execute.”36

  Kit Surrey’s design ensured that the audience did not at any stage forget the racial tensions affecting the behavior of the play’s characters:

  The back wall was crumbling plaster broken away to reveal the brickwork beneath, and on that wall were two images of religious conflict: an ornate shrine for the Madonna and a Star of David daubed in yellow paint. The Venice scenes were dimly lit through smoke to suggest danger and decay. By contrast Belmont was lit brilliantly … [however], the image of Belmont was marred by the presence of the back wall: by not having the two warring images removed, there could never be a true sense of peace.37

  Portia offered no redemption from this brutality, racism, and underlying sense of conflict:

  Deborah Findlay’s intriguing Portia is a tart, astringent figure constantly boxing people’s ears and guilty, to put it mildly, of social tactlessness, in dismissing Morocco with “Let all of his complexion choose me so” in front of her own black servant.38

  [She] has nothing of the healer, or seer, or Desdemona in her. She wants her husband white, bright, and speaking the right Latin tongue … Even if the blood beneath everyone’s skin is red, her father could surely not have wanted all her elegant curls, flounced dresses and milky looks to be married to a black face. She cuffs her Negro servant with a relish which looks customary, and she keeps a polite but distinguishing distance from Lorenzo’s new bride.39