The Merchant of Venice

by William Shakespeare

  TRESNJAK: The only answer that I can give is a theatrical one and not a bit rational. But if it all came down to being rational we certainly would not need theater, and I think that Shakespeare understood the appeal of the irrational gesture on stage more than any playwright before or since. I think that Shylock unleashes a hurt, isolated, and vengeful part inside of all of us, and I can’t say that either F. Murray Abraham or I tried to soften his jagged edges. It is one of those strange paradoxical roles where you gain the audience’s sympathy by not asking for it. The worst thing to do is try to be ingratiating. In the universe of The Merchant of Venice, Shylock’s quest for the pound of flesh cuts through the layers of hypocrisy. Theatrically, it is as potent and as irrational as the statue of Hermione coming to life at the end of The Winter’s Tale. But it connects to a different, darker side of our fantasy life, the desire to maim as opposed to heal.

  “The quality of mercy” is one of the great speeches in Shakespeare, but does Portia’s (cross-dressed) courtroom performance come from the same place in her as her behavior and language in Belmont?

  TRESNJAK: I don’t think that Portia could have uttered “The quality of mercy” speech before meeting Bassanio. The first moment that we see them together on stage, she speaks her other famous monologue (“I pray you tarry. Pause a day or two …”). I think that Shakespeare is telling us something about the transformative power of love. It makes Portia more eloquent. It gives her courage to go on a big adventure, travel to Venice, put on a disguise, and save the day. But the irony is that she knows so little about Venice, Shylock, Antonio, and even her new husband. And by the end of the scene, her plea for mercy will seem rather perverse.

  In Shakespeare After All, Marjorie Garber writes: “on the level of sheer beauty of language and power of dramaturgy, the play is disturbingly appealing, just at those moments when one might wish it to be unappealing. The most magnificent of its speeches are also, in some ways, the most wrongheaded.” I thought about this notion throughout the rehearsal process, especially during the trial scene, where we see Portia at her most eloquent and her most ignorant.

  Lancelet Gobbo is not Shakespeare’s most memorable clown, but he at the very least has an important structural role, doesn’t he?

  THACKER: I was very lucky indeed to have a wonderfully gifted comic actor, Chris Luscombe, who’s now a director, playing Lancelet Gobbo. I did think, “How am I going to make this work in a modern dress production?” It was one of the things I just couldn’t see working. We did cut quite a lot to help it along, but he made it work brilliantly, he was so funny and so real, and I have to say all the credit has to go to him. He solved the problem for me, and he was utterly credible within the context of this play. I was a very lucky director to find someone who made a very tricky situation not only not difficult, but effortlessly real and funny.

  TRESNJAK: I find him intriguing because he seems like a rather ambitious young clown. From Shylock to Bassanio to Belmont, he pops up all over the place. He is both literally and upwardly mobile. He’ll do well.

  Lorenzo and Jessica: why does Shakespeare take them to Belmont and give them that poetic and musical exchange at the beginning of the fifth act?

  THACKER: Bear in mind this is quite an early play in Shakespeare’s development as a playwright. As he got older he was able to bring things to a harmonious conclusion in a way that came completely organically out of the play. I think Act 5 has fundamentally a healing function. That’s why it is so beautiful and so poetic and should be, I think, very real and very moving. It’s hard to get right, but it should be a transition into healing. But of course there are two characters in it who are uncomfortable: one is Jessica, because of her betrayal of her roots and her father, and the other is Antonio, because of the trauma he’s just been through and his being left on the stage by himself when everyone else is paired up. He is the only man left there, the gay man when all the couples have gone off and happily got married, so there’s a bittersweet moment there, but I think these are subtle nuances that should be allowed to be there without banging them into people’s faces.

  TRESNJAK: I find that this is the hardest scene to write about and the most intriguing scene to stage. One can interpret it and stage it a hundred different ways, all of them equally valid. But regardless of the staging, there is something genuinely startling and heartbreaking about hearing such gorgeous poetry after the appalling ending of the trial scene. The radical shift in tone is its own reward. Near the end of their exchange, Lorenzo speaks three lines that, to me, were the thesis statement for our production:

  Such harmony is in immortal souls,

  But whilst this muddy vesture of decay

  Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.

  Is there a risk of the final act, with the business of exchanging rings, sagging after the drama of the courtroom scene, particularly as audiences who aren’t familiar with the play might expect the courtroom scene to represent its climax?

  THACKER: I think that Shakespeare’s imagination probably ran away with him: that he loved so much the writing of Shylock, and he turns out to be such a wonderful character, that you might think that in one sense the play is unbalanced in terms of what was probably the original impulse to write it. How the audience reacts to Shylock being made a Christian is pretty crucial. I think Shakespeare probably thought of it as a good thing, a gift. It’s very difficult for our modern sensibilities to accept that and the natural consequence of that action was for the audience to be shocked at that point. I was very happy for them to be shocked, but we tried to make it clear that Portia was herself shocked at the outcome. Portia gives Shylock every possible chance. We tried to make that completely clear in the play—she gives him so many opportunities to be forgiving that he doesn’t take.

  TRESNJAK: I think that the effectiveness of the final act depends entirely on the choices that are made during the trial scene. At the very least, Portia and Nerissa are going to hear Bassanio and Gratiano profess that their esteem for Antonio is greater than their love for their new wives. In addition to that, Shakespeare gives Gratiano the most vicious attacks on Shylock. Add to that the possibility that Portia notices some homoerotic overtones in Bassanio’s interactions with Antonio. Then there is also the possibility that Nerissa may not approve of Portia’s actions during the trial. And the result is a fifth act that’s brimming with tensions: between Portia and Nerissa; Portia and Bassanio; Nerissa and Gratiano; and Portia and Antonio. (The moment when Portia welcomes Antonio to Belmont strikes me as wonderfully curt and cryptic.) In our production, I thought of the last act as a brief reversal of The Taming of the Shrew, or The Shaping of the Husbands, as I like to call it. I think the audience truly enjoyed watching Bassanio and Gratiano squirm when Portia and Nerissa went after them.

  At the end of our Merchant, the three couples went off to party and Antonio was left alone, contemplating Shylock’s yarmulke that, earlier in the scene, fell out of Portia’s pocket. I wanted to show that, by the end of the play, both Shylock and Antonio are outsiders.

  PLAYING SHYLOCK: INTERVIEWS WITH ANTONY SHER AND HENRY GOODMAN

  Sir Antony Sher was born in Cape Town in 1949, and trained as an actor at the Webber Douglas academy in London. He joined the Liverpool Everyman theater in the 1970s, working with a group of gifted young actors and writers which included Willy Russell, Alan Bleasdale, Julie Walters, Trevor Eve, and Jonathan Pryce. He joined the RSC in 1982 and played the title role in Tartuffe and the Fool in King Lear. In 1984 he won both the Evening Standard and Laurence Olivier awards for his performance in the RSC’s Richard III. Since then he has played numerous leading roles in the theater as well as on film and television, including Stanley and Primo at the National Theatre and on Broadway (Stanley winning him a second Olivier Award, and Primo two New York Awards), and, at the RSC, Tamburlaine, Cyrano de Bergerac, and Macbeth, as well as Prospero in The Tempest, Iago in Othello, and Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, directed by Bill Alexander, which he discusses h
ere. He also writes books and plays, including the theatrical memoirs Year of the King (1985), Woza Shakespeare: Titus Andronicus in South Africa (1997, cowritten with his partner Gregory Doran), and his autobiography, Beside Myself (2001). As an artist, his recent exhibitions have included the London Jewish Cultural Centre (2007) and the National Theatre (2009).

  Henry Goodman was born in 1950. After graduating from RADA he moved to South Africa, running Athol Fugard’s Space Theatre in Cape Town. Returning to England in the 1980s he quickly made a name for himself in a remarkably versatile range of roles, winning the Olivier Award for Best Actor in 1993 for his role in Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins. At the RSC his work includes Richard III, Volpone, The Comedy of Errors, and They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? At the National Theatre he won his second Olivier Award for his portrayal of Shylock in Trevor Nunn’s production of The Merchant of Venice, discussed here, as well as playing Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls, Roy Cohn in Angels in America, and Philip Gellburg in Broken Glass. In the West End his roles include Duet for One, Billy Flynn in Chicago, Freud in Hysteria, and Eddie in Feelgood, and on Broadway his work includes Tartuffe and Art.

  His television and film work includes The Damned United, Churchill, Colour Me Kubrick, Notting Hill, Mary Reilly, and The Mayor of Casterbridge.

  Shylock is a major role, but he is on stage for very few scenes, so there is little opportunity for gradual evolution of his character: is that a particular challenge?

  AS: I think that Shylock is extremely well structured as a role, with one exception (I wish he had a final scene, an Act 5 Scene 2, after all the lightweight comedy about missing rings in 5.1), but there is still ample opportunity to develop his character. To summarize: in Act 1 Scene 3, we see him as he normally is in public, treading a tightrope with the Christians, now being humble, now resentful, now darkly humorous; in Act 2 Scene 5, we see him as he is in private—paranoid and strict (as a father); in Act 3 Scene 1, we see this troubled man explode, almost splitting into two—shaken senseless by his daughter’s elopement, while rejoicing crazily at Antonio’s misfortunes; in Act 3 Scene 3, we see how he has now hardened, the split personality fused into a single immovable force; in Act 4 Scene 1, the “Trial Scene,” we see a horrible spectacle—the new monstrous Shylock ruling supreme at first, and then being cut down, piece by piece, till he is a shadow of his former self, and finally loses everything. What a journey.

  HG: No, because what you get in Merchant are huge events in the offstage life that forcefully inform and cause the remarkable things you see. The sparing use of the actual presence of Shylock onstage means that the huge events that happen in his family life, in his home, in his social milieu, in a broader sense socially and politically, but in a very direct sense in his daily life, are immediate and active catalysts that we witness in his development when he is onstage. For example, with the taunting of the young lads-about-town, the irritation with his servant at home, Gobbo, and then the huge upheaval in his family life after Jessica elopes with a Christian, all of these events are like an emotional tidal wave that expose the bare foundations and leave him naked and visceral. I think he’s sparingly used, but when he does come on he is just overwhelming in force to everybody else around him. In theater, as in life, situation always breeds character; how people deal with challenges, pressures, or opportunities reveals who they really are.

  Villain or victim?

  AS: He is both victim and villain, strictly in that order, and epitomizes a syndrome which fascinates me, and has featured often in my work, both as an actor and a writer: the persecuted turning into the persecutor. I witnessed it in my native South Africa. In colonial times, the Boers were persecuted by the British, who, during the Anglo-Boer War, invented the concentration camp, starving and killing thousands of Boer women and children. But then when the Boers gained power, becoming the Afrikaners, they created Apartheid, and persecuted the blacks. Meanwhile, my family fled anti-Semitic persecution in Eastern Europe, settled in South Africa, gradually prospered, and ended up supporting the racist Afrikaner government. Seldom do human beings seem to learn from experience, seldom do they draw the obvious comparisons between what they have previously suffered and now go on to inflict. As with Shylock. In his first scene, he describes how the Christians treat him as a second-class citizen, their form of “kaffir”: “You call me misbeliever, cut-throat dog, / And spit upon my Jewish gaberdine.” To be spat upon is a small, physically harmless, yet particularly foul form of humiliation (as I learned during the Jew-baiting scenes in our production). Surely someone who has endured this outrage wouldn’t want it done to others? No, indeed—Shylock wants worse. He wants a pound of flesh cut from Antonio. It’s a worthless thing, inedible to man, “a weight of carrion flesh” as he says himself, but, now that he has the upper hand, this bruised and battered victim simply wants revenge of the most violent kind.

  HG: I cannot help but be deeply affected by Shakespeare, as with all his writing, showing many sides of the picture—many more than simply continuing the notion that all foreigners are evil and dangerous. He’s far more balanced and sophisticated than that, and it’s only by going more deeply into the details of the text that we can explore that. I did a great deal of reading around the history of the production and I found all that liberating, because you realize that everyone who ever played the role is trying to deal with the essential problem of whether you fall into the trap of deciding, am I villain or victim? The key is the inner experience he is having. I feel he’s a victim of himself. There are many people treated harshly by life who manage to stop themselves from becoming vicious and ugly because they have the inner resources or countervailing warmth and generosity of spirit within them to offset the poison. But Shylock hasn’t—he has been poisoned by the pressure of the reality he lives in. I think we see that in the scene with Jessica and Gobbo in his home. The home, I think we should believe from Jessica’s words, is a prison. She may belong to his nation, but not to his manner, and in that wonderful speech that she has, she hates him for his hatred. It’s clearly more than natural teenage rebellion, it’s religious repression: there’s something in the orthodoxy of Shylock’s behavior that really upsets her deeply. It’s a type of fanaticism. For Shylock there’s a sense that your home is a retreat from the world. Jessica wants it to be open, to be a passport to the world in every sense. But then you have to understand that their home is in a ghetto. In this the details are important: by sunset every night you have to be inside with the doors firmly closed; if you’re not inside you have to pay a huge fine to the authorities. They are locked in on the site of an old iron foundry (the Italian is barghetto, where ghetto comes from). Every night this community of people that would have come from all over the Mediterranean, Persia, France, Jews from Europe, Russia, the Ottoman Empire and other exotic places, would have to get out of the city and into the ghetto. What binds them is an enforced identity as aliens. So they take solace from that very otherness—solace and, crucially, strength. In Shylock, a potentially villainous, fanatical, justified strength of thought, strength of righteousness. A strength that is self-harming and eventually condones, with right and God on its side, murder. There’s a wonderful book by Cecil Roth on the history of the Jews which gives a great insight into the lives of their dynamic and exciting cultures throughout Europe (in the late sixteenth century). Shakespeare doesn’t concentrate on that aspect, and this is the interesting thing: what Shakespeare does is show the effect of the political and the social on the private man. The individual tortured by society. He shows how that very society “breeds” its own monsters, monsters that will wound it deeply. Also, in a similar way, domestically: that’s why Shakespeare goes out of his way to show that this man has no wife. Jessica is his wife: his daughter has to be mature beyond her years; she not only lives in a very orthodox, repressive regime, but emotionally her father is a disturbed man. He is obsessed, not just by money-making but by protecting himself from the savagery of the awfulness of the life out there on the street
s. There is a psychological ghetto in the home scenes as much as the physical ghetto outside.

  Though often regarded as an especially isolated character, we see Shylock with Tubal, and his family is obviously very important to him (his relationship with Jessica, his memory of his wife Leah): did you seek to convey both these aspects?