The Shakespeare Wars

by Ron Rosenbaum

  I felt so strongly about this that, when I heard the actor Henry Goodman give a talk about his Shakespearean roles, particularly his Shylock (in the Trevor Nunn National Theatre production I’d seen), I forsook my reluctance to speak up at public talks—and asked him a pointed question.

  My reluctance to challenge Henry Goodman came from the same kind of respect I had for someone like Peter Brook. Goodman was an actor of undeniable brilliance, a Jew who was, in playing Shylock, conscientiously trying to do the right thing. Who certainly wouldn’t have done it if he felt he were in any way advancing a more sophisticated—any kind of—anti-Semitism. Someone who clearly had taken the question seriously and sincerely believed in his rationale.

  And had been rewarded by almost universal praise in the British press for his achievement. In John O’Connor’s survey of “Shylock in Performance” (in Mahon and Mahon’s The Merchant of Venice: New Critical Essays) he cites ecstatic reviews of Goodman in Nunn’s production (for which he won the Olivier Award for Best Actor in 1999). Reviewers call Goodman “overwhelming,” “superb,” “magnificent,” “magnificently perceptive,” “brilliantly conceived, superlatively detailed,” “penetrating, complex and … moving.”

  When I saw it I was less overwhelmed. I think there is a tendency among reviewers of Merchant who wish to avoid the difficult issue of the play’s anti-Semitism to overpraise the actor playing Shylock (particularly when he’s a Jew). But Goodman’s skill was undeniable and he was so smart and engaging in talking about other aspects of Shakespeare that evening (he said something about Richard III—which he was preparing to play for the RSC—which suddenly made Shakespeare’s method in that play “click” for me, as Peter Hall might say).

  Still I had my problems with Goodman’s Shylock, which his skill could not transcend. Problems with the ultra-restrained, genteel, even gentile, tweedy Shylock he played, virtually like an Oxbridge intellectual in Nunn’s 1930s setting.

  I had problems as well with Nunn’s decision, as O’Connor points out, to soften both the anti-Semitism of the Christians (Antonio never spits at Shylock in this production) and the anti-Christian animus of Shylock. Nunn radically shifted the position of a key Shylock speech early in the “original” play. It’s a speech in which Shylock viciously invokes not a personal grudge against Antonio, but the purported “ancient grudge” of his “tribe,” of all Jews in other words, against all Christians.

  By shifting that speech from early in the play, when it is portrayed as part of the essence of his, of a Jew’s, essential character, till much later when it can be seen as Shylock’s more justifiable personal emotional reaction to the theft of his daughter by the Christians, Nunn gives us a more humane Shylock than Shakespeare’s original.

  And in Goodman’s talk he used the Jew of Malta evasion which has become quite popular in recent years: Marlowe’s Jew, in this view, was far more wicked than the oh-so-human Shylock Shakespeare gave us.

  But Marlowe’s Jew, Barabas, is such an obvious, over-the-top caricature of a stock-comic villain, it makes The Jew of Malta far less insidiously anti-Semitic than Shakespeare’s play in my view. So I felt I had to challenge Goodman’s goody-goody Shylock during the question period, although I tried to do it in the most respectful manner:

  “I was privileged to see your Shylock,” I told Goodman, “and you played him with great dignity, but isn’t there a danger when you play him with such dignity that you exacerbate the anti-Semitism by showing that beneath the most dignified, civilized Jew there is someone who is willing to take out a knife and cut the heart out of a Christian for a debt? As opposed to Marlowe’s obvious stock villain in The Jew of Malta, isn’t a Shylock who’s given a more dignified façade a more dangerously anti-Semitic Shylock?”

  Goodman took the question seriously enough to give a long, heartfelt and occasionally surprising reply:

  “I think that underneath any person, whether it be Jew, Christian or any other type person, there is that possibility. It’s not a danger, it’s what Shakespeare offered us to explore. But you have to admit there is that prospect, you’ve got to admit it’s there.”

  Then he shifted abruptly and conceded, “It’s almost impossible to put on this play after the Holocaust, there’s something distasteful about it. My job in that context—and Trevor and I talked about this—is if you’re going to do it in this context, show a man in all his dimensions.”

  There is a questionable assumption here, to me at least, that one should start with the belief that it’s a “job” worth doing, just because somebody, even Trevor Nunn, asks you to do it. Especially if the job calls for the rationalizing, gentling, gentrifying of this distasteful play “after the Holocaust.” It seems to come from an apparently desperate need to believe that Shakespeare cannot be flawed, can never be at fault, that everything he did had to have transcended the prejudices of his time—my least favorite form of bardolatry. That Shylock was a universal, not a Jewish, villain (“a man in all his dimensions”), and not even much of a villain at that.

  Nonetheless Goodman was just getting started; he proceeded to justify taking this “job” by veering into a curiously hostile-sounding description of the Jews he’d grown up among:

  “I grew up with Orthodox Jews all around me and I saw these people do the most appalling things. I saw it every day of my life. So I’ve seen people do what you’re frightened of—beat their wives, viciously curse their children, become arrogant, vicious religious bigots. I’ve seen it day after day after day for years. I’ve also seen there are Christians who are warm, wonderful, uplifting—magnificent people who helped me and my community, which was very poor. So I don’t have this exclusion theory that Jews are better than others.”

  It was interesting, something I didn’t notice at the time, only later when listening to the tape, a little bit of hostile projection on me: that I was “frightened” of seeing an unsympathetic Jew. That I had an “exclusion theory” that “Jews are better.” One doesn’t have to believe “Jews are better” to register dismay at the evasion of the anti-Jewish animus in the play. It’s true that I called the warm and dignified Shylock potentially more “dangerously anti-Semitic,” so I suppose in a pejorative way you could say I was “frightened” of the consequences of perpetuating, however unintentionally, an essentialist anti-Semitic stereotype that Jews had been murdered for. But Goodman seemed to think I was frightened of any potentially negative reflection on Jews (not true of someone who loves Portnoy’s Complaint).

  I don’t think that’s what I meant. I think that I was trying to say that, in fact, one should not attempt to hide from, evade or disguise the reality of The Merchant of Venice. That it is not some inoffensive universalist critique of the potential for darkness in the human nature shared by all human beings of all religions, but specifically a critique of something essential, something theologically specific to Jews. That one cannot ignore the play’s embrace of the notion that Christian mercy is superior when juxtaposed to a pejorative vision of a specifically Jewish lust for vengeance.

  That Goodman believed the former, universalist interpretation was evident as he continued his remarkably extended response to my question:

  “I think we are all in the same boat. I’m not saying the world is not unjust, I’m saying what psychologists learn day after day: that inside all civilized people there are terrible, awful things that affect every single one of us. I’ve never yet met a decent human being that doesn’t have indecency in him but they learn to deal with it decently.” So in this view Shylock was just a decent ordinary fellow who happened to be Jewish, letting his dark side out.

  He’s such a decent fellow, Henry Goodman, that I wanted to agree with his universalist interpretation; it would make my admiration of Shakespeare in general less problematic if I could embrace this play fully too. But the problem, as John Gross pointed out, is that the terrible things that are done by Shylock are identified specifically as Jewish things, ineluctable aspects of a specifically Jewish stereotype. />
  Shylock’s obsession with vengeful fulfillment of his bond no matter how cruel the consequences (cutting out the pound of flesh “nearest the heart”) is specifically cast as an imprint of Old Testament, Old Law, Jewish theology, the Old Law “superseded” by the New Testament’s new dispensation of mercy, invoked theologically in Portia’s famous “quality of mercy” speech.

  A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE: THE SOCINIAN HERESY

  Still I believe there is an aspect of the play’s theological debate that has been overlooked. I think it is possible to think of The Merchant of Venice as anti-Christian as well as anti-Semitic. Critical of Christian orthodoxy in a subtle, profound and little noticed way. Not anti-Christian in the sense of the currently fashionable defense of Merchant you hear from actors and directors longing for a fig leaf for putting on an undeniably seductive theatrical work with many tour de force parts: the superficial notion that the Christians in the play are “just as bad” as the Jew, just as money-hungry, just as cruel in their way. It’s an interpretation that is strained in that it is forced to ignore the profound theological anti-Semitism in the play: the Christians may betray their ideals, but their ideals are noble, while the Jews are ignoble at heart.

  But I think there is a different, more searching theological critique of Christian doctrine available, barely submerged, in some ways right in your face in Merchant. It’s a critique I came to be attentive to while rereading the play in conjunction with reading William Empson’s scathing work Milton’s God.

  It is one of the last works by the godfather of the New Criticism (my edition was published in 1961). And it expressed a seething rage against an aspect of Christian orthodoxy Empson had expressed repeatedly in other contexts. Empson was obsessed with what he felt was a kind of barbaric and bloodthirsty doctrine at the heart of Christian orthodoxy, one he believed Milton wrestled unsuccessfully with: the Doctrine of Satisfaction. The way most orthodox Christianity explains the meaning and necessity of the Crucifixion: that God would not extend his mercy to man, his absolution for Original Sin, that God would not spare man from everlasting damnation without “satisfaction”: without man having to pay a debt. The Doctrine of Satisfaction holds in effect that the Christian God demanded a blood sacrifice, the sacrifice of his only begotten son-become-man as “satisfaction” for man’s debt of sin.

  That God, in other words, shared something with Shylock: they both, in effect, demanded a bloody pound of flesh to settle a debt. That Jesus was the Christian God’s pound of flesh.

  Those who quarrel with the Doctrine of Satisfaction were said by most orthodox Christian theologians to be guilty of the “Socinian heresy,” after the sixteenth-century theologian Faustus (!) Socinus, who contested the Doctrine of Satisfaction. And argued that Christ’s suffering on the cross was meant to be an exemplum of his identification with human suffering—that forgiveness for original sin was not something “bought” by Christ’s bloody death, but freely granted by God. Would that make Shakespeare a secret Socinian? Impossible to know, but at least as probable or provable as the belief his work should be read as a secret Catholic allegory.

  I don’t offer this as a way of absolving the play’s anti-Semitism or of restoring Shakespeare to uncritical bardolatry-worthiness, but to show there may be a theme genuinely subversive of Christian orthodoxy that has been ignored by those who attempt to absolve Shakespeare and Shylock on more superficial and unconvincing grounds.

  It was a thought I had again when Henry Goodman concluded his response to my question by counterposing his universalist Everyman Shylock to what he called “the old-fashioned stereotypes in which Shylock was always played in a red wig.”

  The red wig reference is not insignificant. The red wig had become a convention of theatrical Shylocks up until the nineteenth century. A sinister convention because the red wig was long the mark of Judas, the ultimate Jewish villain, betrayer of Jesus, in the medieval Mystery Plays that survived till Shakespeare’s time. Playing Shylock in a red wig, linking him to Judas, was not, in my view, an antiquated exacerbation of the anti-Semitism of the play that (as Goodman seemed to believe) one could cast off as one could a hairpiece. The red wig was rather the outward manifestation of the deep theological anti-Semitism inextricably embedded in the play.

  And one of the things that struck me when Steven Berkoff talked about playing Shylock is that he preferred to play him in the traditional red wig. He didn’t use a wig when he did passages from Shylock’s speeches in his Shakespeare’s Villains traveling show at the Public Theater. He didn’t use any costumes at all, just casual black garb on a bare stage. But the difference over the wig was, I think, a symbol of why I preferred Berkoff’s more honest, more true-to-the-original, true to the play, Shylock, to Henry Goodman’s user-friendly Jew, so to speak.

  That’s why I found Berkoff’s Shylock courageous, utterly uncompromising. Such a convincing contrast to the gentrified Shylocks one sees in almost every misguided contemporary production. It’s profoundly disturbing because the unvarnished loathsomeness of his characterization brings to the surface on stage something the feel-good Shylocks avert their eyes from. Berkoff’s Shylock is the Jew in the medieval woodcut—the woodcut of the sort that depicts the ritual-murder blood-libel: the caftan-clad, hook-nosed, bearded Jewish rabbi, making an incision in the body of a Christian child to extract the blood for ritual use. Berkoff’s Shylock is not a figure out of Victorian drawing rooms or Oxford common rooms that the likes of Olivier and Henry Goodman have given us. His Shylock comes from deep in the fevered unconscious of medieval Jew-hatred.

  And it’s there. Berkoff is not fabricating it, he finds it in the language. In a certain way the spittle is the key. Shylock is both spit upon (except in Trevor Nunn’s production) and spitter. Shakespeare wrote Shylock’s lines in such a way, with so many explosive and hissing S’s, that they virtually burst with an emotionally poisonous spittle. Consider Shylock’s first address to Antonio, the man whose heart he will later seek to cut out. This first speech is Shylock’s response to Antonio’s request for a loan on behalf of his friend Bassanio:

  Signior Antonio, many a time and oft

  In the Rialto you have rated me

  About my moneys and my usances.

  Still have I borne it with a patient shrug

  (For suff’rance is the badge of all our tribe).

  You call me misbeliever, cut-throat dog,

  And spet upon my Jewish gaberdine,

  And all for use of that which is mine own.

  Well then, it now appears you need my help.

  Go to then, you come to me, and you say,

  “Shylock, we would have moneys,” you say so—

  You, that did void your rheum upon my beard,

  And foot me as you spurn a stranger cur

  Over your threshold; moneys is your suit.

  What should I say to you: Should I not say,

  “Hath a dog money? Is it possible

  A cur can lend three thousand ducats?” Or

  Shall I bend low and in a bondman’s key,

  With bated breath and whisp’ring humbleness,

  Say this:

  “Fair sir, you spet on me on Wednesday last,

  You spurn’d me such a day, another time

  You call’d me dog, and for these courtesies

  I’ll lend you thus much moneys”?

  When Berkoff did this passage as part of his Shakespeare’s Villains one-man show at the Public Theater, I felt I was coming face-to-face for the first time with the original Shylock, with the full force, the living embodiment, the deeply repellent image of the anti-Semite’s Jew: Shakespeare’s Shylock.

  Even if one reads that passage silently one can’t help but notice how packed with hissing S’s it is, serpentine, satanic hissing S’s. Not only is it packed with repeated references to spitting—“You … spet upon my Jewish gaberdine”; you “did void your rheum upon my beard”; “you spet on me on Wednesday last”—but there’s spittle built into every line.


  Antonio spat, but Shylock is spittle, formed from “linguistic fabric indistinguishable” (as Don Foster might say) from venomous spittle.

  In Berkoff’s hissing, sniveling rendition of this passage he hits every S with a small explosion. Berkoff’s spittle could be seen exploding into the spotlit air of the stage. His Shylock was wronged, yes, but repulsive in his feigned obsequiousness to his tormentors.

  Berkoff did this at New York’s Public Theater without costume, caftan, red wig, stage beard or stage blood. He did it by finding it in the language, the way the language Shakespeare has given Shylock twists him into a writhing creature of spittle, obsequiousness and malice—as much Uriah Heep as Fagin.

  This is Berkoff’s talent, this is what he did with his Richard III: nothing “avant-garde” but quite the opposite. He reaches back and draws upon the original primal emotional power of Shakespeare’s villains there in the language. A power that depends on a belief in evil as a profound factor, a real source of human behavior, not just an unfortunate effect of low self-esteem, say. He reaches back before psychologizing explanations for villainy made the villains into victims (of some syndrome or other) and robbed them of their original malevolent power to put us in touch with something more adamantine and frightening, an evil one senses Shakespeare believed in and endowed certain of his characters with. Fathomless—or not easily fathomed—malignity.

  Berkoff didn’t create or confect this primal creature of spittle. He found it there, once he scraped away the incrustations of embarrassed, evasive attempts to dignify an undignifiable character.