The Shakespeare Wars

by Ron Rosenbaum

  THE MYSTERY OF THE RING

  And here is the least discussed, most ingenious (or dissembling) little trick Radford plays. I have not seen anyone comment on its inept meretriciousness. But it shouldn’t go unchallenged since this will be the version of Merchant most people will see for a long time.

  It’s an instance of how film directors have found a way to use the beginnings and endings of Shakespeare films to “contextualize,” or more mundanely, put their spin on, the play that comes before or after.

  At its best this can be an intellectually provocative ploy, as in Michael Hoffman’s way with the ending of his film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He gives us an ending that does not stop with Puck’s blessing of the marriage beds, gives us an addendum in which we follow Kevin Kline’s dapper, guileless, charming Bottom home to the domestic confines of his real life and his real wife. Without adding a word of dialogue Hoffman is subtly asserting his vision of A Midsummer Night’s Dream: that it is, at bottom, Bottom’s play, that Bottom is the one who has traversed all realms of human and godlike fantasy—and that he, like us, must somehow learn to live with the memory once he returns home.

  But in his Merchant Radford does something more tricky. He adds two scenes after Shakespeare ends the play. First he shows Shylock, who has been forced to convert to Christianity, seeking to enter—and being barred from—the synagogue of his friends and fellow Jews. Shylock looking, silently, more crushed than ever. (Radford, apparently thinking this will make us feel bad for Shylock, is apparently unaware that this makes the Jews look more cruel than the Christians.)

  After this non-Shakespearean play for sympathy for Shylock, we then get another such ploy: what is meant to be a poignant shot of Shylock’s daughter, Jessica, the one who has run off with a thieving Christian, the daughter who has stolen his ducats and his jewels. Shakespeare’s Merchant, you’ll recall, ends with some bawdy jollity from Gratiano about his new wife Nerissa’s “ring,” which has been the subject of erotic raillery at the close of the play (Portia and Nerissa disguised as lawyer and law clerk have cozened Bassanio and Gratiano, their newly betrothed, out of their rings in return for having saved Antonio’s life from Shylock).

  After the merry disguise and ring ruse has been resolved, Gratiano takes his bride to bed with the words:

  Well, while I live I’ll fear no other thing

  So sore, as keeping safe Nerissa’s ring.

  So Shakespeare’s Merchant ends on a note of bawdy reconciliation. But for contemporary directors eager to evade the failure of Shakespeare to be contrite about the anti-Semitism, the end of Merchant has become their “Jewish moment,” so to speak.

  So it was for Trevor Nunn in his Royal National Theatre production, which ends not with unapologetic comic bawdiness but rather with the return of a mournful, remorseful Jessica, alone on stage accompanied by keening Jewish vocal music, gazing off (we’re apparently meant to believe) toward her abandoned father.

  In searching for justification for, in effect, silently rewriting the concluding tone and content of Shakespeare’s Merchant, directors have looked to a single line in the last act. When Jessica and Lorenzo are stargazing at lovely Belmont, they hear music and she says, cryptically, “I am never merry when I hear sweet music.”

  This can be a beautiful, subtle touch—perhaps it’s not the sweet music that’s making her melancholy; it’s her separation from her father, her faith, her former life.

  But this subtle moment, by no means the note on which Shakespeare ended Merchant, has licensed well-meaning philosemitic directors to attempt to redeem the play from its anti-Semitism at its very last moment, by giving Jessica a star-turn in order to conclude the play with a sorrowful Jew feeling the weight of an anti-Semitic world.

  We are supposed to intuit in her deep feelings of regret and affection for her abandoned Jewish identity. And of course recognize the deep reverence for Jewishness on the part of the people behind the production.

  Radford’s approach might be seen as even more heavy-handed were it not so curiously inept in its O. Henry-ish ambitions.

  Once again Jessica stars in a concluding “Jewish moment” (actually the second Jewish moment after the spectacle of Shylock’s exclusion from the synagogue). Radford makes his Jewish moment about Jessica’s turquoise ring.

  You’ll recall that momentary flash of human feeling Shylock displays when his moneylender friend Tubal tells him of the reports he’s heard about the behavior of Shylock’s absconded daughter.

  Tubal claims he was shown a ring by one of Antonio’s creditors. One “that he had of your daughter for a monkey.”

  This cuts Shylock to the quick:

  “Out upon her! Thou torturest me, Tubal. It was my turkis [turquoise], I had it of [his dead wife] Leah when I was a bachelor. I would not have given it for a wilderness of monkeys.”

  A wilderness of monkeys! A phrase with an eerie, chilling, heartbreaking, expressive power. One of those strange memorable phrases that is Shakespeare at his most “Shakespearean.” Radford accompanies it with a quick flashback cut to a scene of a flushed, wanton-looking Jessica apparently in some tavern laughing as she trades her ring for a monkey, an animal traditionally associated with brazen lust (as is “ring” given salacious connotation in the very last exchange of the play).

  But Radford apparently doesn’t want to give us a Jew, Jessica, with any flaws. Having needlessly conjured up the picture of the wanton vixen Jessica, he seems to want to undo it. No anti-Semitism here, remember. No bad behavior by Jews. Not in The Merchant of Venice.

  And so in the final shot of the movie we see Jessica, separated from the Christians at Belmont in what has now become the traditional non-Shakespearean “Jewish moment.” But unlike Nunn’s silently weeping Jessica hearing Hebrew melodies, here she’s doing something strange: she’s gazing at the turquoise ring on her finger, and—clearly—thinking longingly of her father and mother.

  But how did she get the turquoise ring back? Or did she ever give it away? Did the monkey have a money-back guarantee? Was the vivid flashback to the flushed and wanton Jessica just Shylock’s tormented imagination, inflamed by a false story told to torment him by his false Jewish friend Tubal?

  To saddle one of Shakespeare’s most difficult, important, problematic plays with some labored attempt at an O. Henry “surprise” ending seems, if not beneath contempt, beyond comment. The only thing one can say for it is that most people I spoke to who’d seen it couldn’t figure out what it was supposed to be doing there. What it was attempting to add to Shakespeare’s conception of Jessica, the play, Jews, monkeys, you name it. All it conjured up was a poorly focused desperation to prove that Shakespeare had somehow written a philosemitic play, a desperation that spoke more clearly than anything of the anti-Semitism it sought to cover up.

  Any attentive spectator’s thoughts leaving the movie theater are less likely to be about “racism” or “anti-Semitism” or the relationship between justice and mercy but rather: What was that ring thing about? What happened to the monkey?

  The most “logical” (if that is the word) possibility that suggests itself is that Tubal’s account to Shylock of Jessica’s ring-for-monkey trade was false. A malicious falsehood designed to hurt him—whether by one of Antonio’s creditors or by Tubal himself. Though why would Tubal, his supposed friend, seek to torture Shylock as he does? (Because he’s a Jew, and that’s a typically Jewish thing to do? No, no anti-Semitism here, can’t be.)

  Radford’s motivations for this unnecessary and over-ingenious, poorly thought out device (which will nonetheless become the ending of Merchant for the millions now and in the future) are as incoherent as the device.* I wish I didn’t feel an obligation to point out this deceit posing as a Shakespearean finale, but alas, none of the critics I read paid it any attention, nobody seemed to care. It’s not as if the way Shakespeare’s plays end matters much, does it? Or that we should pay any attention to his last word on such a question when there are so many more things to s
ay in the director’s head.

  POOR AL

  Of course Radford’s chief “device,” one might say, is Al Pacino and the way he had him play the Jew.

  It’s deeply sad watching Pacino’s denatured Shylock. Especially when you revisit Looking for Richard—which contains a few scenes of Pacino playing Richard III with a brilliant malevolence: to see all that talent for malice subdued here, despite the language that licenses it.

  Resolutely stifling his talent, Pacino plays Shylock as nothing more than a hard-pressed workingman, and a dull one at that. A blue-collar “Joe Six-pack Shylock” I called him in an essay at the time of the release. A Shylock who’s just a harassed Jewish father worried about his daughter, almost like Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof. I suggested they retitle Radford’s film The Usurer on the Roof.

  This was a bit unkind, but I felt Pacino’s studied, sedulous sullenness was a mistake, robbed his Shylock of his inherent theatricality as a character for the sake of some dumbed-down idea that Shakespeare didn’t think of him as malevolent but merely dumb and wronged.

  I saw the Radford/Pacino Merchant twice within a two-week interval just to make sure I was seeing what I thought I saw, and I must say the second time it seemed even worse. The second time I found myself fascinated by a moment in the trial scene when Shylock is seen whetting his knife, sharpening the blade the better to carry out his “forfeiture” by using that knife to cut a pound of flesh from Antonio, “nearest the heart.”

  “Why dost thou whet thy knife so earnestly?” Bassanio asks, in the text, making it clear Shylock is doing his chilling knife-sharpening in full view of all, seeking to torment and terrify, before exacting his revenge.

  Here is the most vile anti-Semitic scene in the play, one which would inevitably call up in the minds of Shakespeare’s audiences ingrained cultural memories of ritual murder accusations against Jews (the “blood libel”). Shakespeare certainly knew what he was doing when he had Shylock demonstratively, eagerly and greedily whet his knife for Christian blood.

  And it is, in a way, a metaphor for the relationship between Shakespeare and anti-Semitism in this play. Shakespeare takes the seldom used (because there were so few Jews in England) old rusty knife of anti-Semitism from the musty drawer, and hones and sharpens it to a vicious cutting edge.

  This aspect of the Jew is what Michael Radford chooses to be faithful to. Because it’s all about Muslims anyway, right? In any case I was amazed that such a travesty was welcomed with open arms by so many film reviewers. It was Shakespeare! The Great Bard! One of his most famous plays! A stellar cast, lavish luxuriant sets, a big budget, Al Pacino. Who would dare question it?

  There were so many oblivious, nearly idiotic quotes from reviewers. “If you’ve never seen Shakespeare on the screen before, this may be the one to see!” said one. And indeed that is the tragedy, it’s likely this is the only Shakespeare on film many will see, and it’s a meretricious impostor from beginning to end. (Well, except for Jeremy Irons as Antonio.)

  As far as I can tell there were only two major reviewers who put their finger on what was really wrong with what has now become the Revised Standard Version of Merchant and Shylock—it’s not anti-Semitic, but about anti-Semitism.

  One was James Bowman, a former editor of the TLS reviewing in The New York Sun, who said this production convinced him that Merchant was just no longer playable. If it had to be transformed into something else from Shakespeare’s Merchant in order to render it inoffensive, why do it at all?

  And Jonathan Freedland, reviewing it in The Guardian, went further in at least one respect than I did in saying that this bowdlerized production was even more anti-Semitic than those productions that didn’t try as hard to deny the reality of what was in the text.

  “It’s clear,” Freedland wrote, “that director Michael Radford does not want to make an anti-semitic film. But he has two big problems. The first is the play. The second is the medium.”

  As for the play, Freedland tells us, “We may want it to be a handy, sixth-form-friendly text exposing the horrors of racism, but Shakespeare refuses to play along.… Harold Bloom has declared, ‘One would have to be blind, deaf and dumb not to recognise that Shakespeare’s grand, equivocal comedy The Merchant of Venice is nevertheless a profoundly anti-semitic work.’

  “There is no getting away from it,” Freedland continued: “Shylock is the villain, bent on disproportionate vengeance. Crucially, his villainy is not shown as a quirk of his own, individual personality [the Henry Goodman rationale], but is rooted overtly in his Jewishness.”

  This is similar to my thinking, and I repeat his views at least in part to suggest that I am not alone in my view. Freedland, Bloom, John Gross find that, with all the equivocations you want to find, there is a unified attempt in Shakespeare’s play to evoke anti-Semitic sentiments and bring them to bear not just on Shylock, but on Jews in general.

  What I suggested in my talk at the Fairleigh Dickinson colloquium is that Keats’s “negative capability” is useful here. Shakespeare was undeniably the greatest playwright in the language. Merchant (the one he wrote, not the travesty Radford filmed) is undeniably anti-Semitic. Negative capability requires us to hold these two opposed concepts in our mind without reducing them to a single conclusion. It doesn’t necessarily make Shakespeare a committed anti-Semite. There is little in the other plays to suggest it was a preoccupation. It does make him an opportunistic dramatist. But we don’t have to distort his drama in order to remove all imperfection from his being.

  But Freedland makes another point worth paying attention to. He says there is something about “the medium,” about film, that exacerbates the worst aspects of the play.

  He argues that Radford “has deepened his trouble by making a film. For the very nature of the medium aggravates the traditional dilemmas of staging The Merchant of Venice. We may want to dismiss Portia and friends as ghastly airheads, in contrast with weighty Shylock, but that’s tricky when they are played by beautiful A-list film stars, in gorgeous locations accompanied by delightful music. How can we do anything but sympathise with Antonio, when he’s played by Jeremy Irons—exposing his chest to Shylock’s knife in an almost Christlike pose?

  “Film is an emotive medium, uniquely able to manipulate through lighting and music as well as words.… More importantly, Shakespeare is simply experienced differently on stage.… To hear the words ‘dog Jew’ shouted on Dolby Surround speakers; to see a Jew fall to his knees and forced to convert to Christianity on a wide screen, cannot fail to have a different, and greater power.”

  He adds, “That doesn’t mean that such scenes should never be shown on film.” And I would agree with him—I don’t believe that Merchant should be banned or never shown. I’m just not sure of the rationale for showing it rather than reading it. One could study it as a historical artifact. One could study its language and patterns of imagery in relation to their use in other plays. But one can’t airbrush it.

  In any case, Freedland concluded, “there should be films that take on anti-semitism. But Michael Radford is not in that game. Amazingly, he told last week’s Jewish Chronicle, ‘I was never worried about the anti-semitism of the play.’ ”

  And it shows. It shows. But I would like to take up Jonathan Freedland’s point about film and Shakespeare and the different effects of film and staged Shakespeare. A subject that requires another chapter, entirely: the next one.

  * ’s question may sound naïve, or old-fashioned, but I was struck recently by the way it was raised in January 2006, by one of the foremost philosophers of our time, Saul Kripke. In a report on a Kripke lecture by Charles McGrath in The New York Times, we learn that Kripke—in the course of a talk called “The First Person”—expressed concern that “it’s one thing when writing about a historical character to try to become that character, and something else again when that character is Hitler.” Essentially the same concern Johnson expressed about acting Richard III.

  * Gross’s actual conclusion is
more modulated: “I personally think it is absurd to suppose that there is a direct line of descent from Antonio to Hitler or Portia to the SS, but that is because I do not believe that the Holocaust was in any way inevitable.…”

  * I’ve omitted any attempt to explain the baffling scene of men shooting arrows (at fish?) in the lagoon that is the very final image in the film. Needless to say another Radford “improvement” on Shakespeare.

  Chapter Ten

  Shakespeare on Film: A Contrarian Argument

  I will be candid and concede at the outset that I have a case I want to make in this chapter. A case that might seem at first paradoxical, perverse, anachronistic, even (horrors) philistine (to certain theater snobs whose pretense to purism outweighs the sophistication of their scholarship).

  A case that, right now, at this very moment, one can see more great Shakespeare, one can find more transformative Shakespearean experiences, from what is already on film even in the form of tape or DVD on a television screen than the average person, even the average critic, will see on stage in a lifetime. A case as well that if you see just four Shakespearean films I’m going to speak of you will have seen more truly Shakespearean performances than all the stage productions you are likely to see in a lifetime. And I will make a further even more controversial claim that in certain ways certain films can be more “Shakespearean” than Shakespeare on stage.

  This is a function both of the greatness one can find on film, and the prevailing mediocrity of Shakespeare on stage, a mediocrity that makes it unlikely one will encounter anything of truly Shakespearean electricity in most Shakespearean productions you will see in your lifetime. You only have to see one to see what you’re missing, and then you’ll face a lifetime of missing it. Better almost you had not known it.