Merchant for Moderns
Seeking the darkness in Shakespeare's play
"Dog Jew," "currish Jew," "wolvish" offspring of an "unhallowed dam." Preparing to read for a role in The Merchant of Venice this spring, our friend and former colleague Chuck Smith says he thought to himself, "I don't know if I can say these things."
As it turned out, he didn't have to. His roles in the production mounted in the Rand Theater in March didn't include those specific slurs. But the context from which they leap out and scratch at the eyes of the contemporary reader is no better. Throughout the play, baseness is Jewish. The flaws of Shylock the money-lender are linked, even attributed, to his being a Jew. Our art director, Elizabeth Pols, returned from a performance impressed but relieved she hadn't taken her young son. "It's so much darker than I remembered," she said.
"Very dark," agrees graduate student in dramaturgy Amy Levinson, who points out, however, that the darkness is deliberate and modern. As dramaturg, or textual consultant, to the production, part of Levinson's job was to research the production history of the play, as well as the period in which the director, fellow M.F.A. candidate Sam Rush, chose to set it. Rush's decision to dress his Renaissance Italian merchants in '80s American power-suits allowed him, says, Levinson, to focus on "the greediness of recent times, and to pull that from every character including Portia."
Those whose Shakespeare needs a lot of brushing up, as did ours, may yet recall Portia as a model heroine: beautiful, brilliant, witty, rich; devoted to her betrothed, Bassanio, but more than his equal. It's Portia, disguised as a "young and learned doctor" of law, who hits upon stratagem that saves the life of Bassanio's friend Antonio. (Shylock may take his "pound of flesh" from the debtor, but if he takes so much as a drop of blood with it, he dies too.) But Portia also mocks the dark skin of a Moroccan suitor, converses in graceful metaphors of buying and selling, and in the court of law, contrives not only to neutralize Shylock but to humiliate and impoverish him, to her friends' gain.
Theater professor Harley Erdman insists we consider something even darker than these dark themes: that Shakespeare may have thought they were funny. The Merchant of Venice was arguably written as a comedy. The character of Shylock has been staged in many ways over the centuries, says Erdman: as villain, as misfit, as clown. The buffoon seems to go back furthest, closest to Shakespeare's own time.
Also, the strange last act of the play strange to modern sensibilities argues for a comic conception of a plot we now find tragic. In Act IV, Shylock is effectively destroyed in the courtroom, with the crowning humiliation of being forced to renounce his faith. In Act V, the Christian characters repair to Portia's country villa to work out their romantic subplots and get married.
Finally, says Erdman, there's the long history of a play put to anti-Semitic uses. Can it be an accident that Merchant was staged dozens of times in Germany between 1933 and 1944? Is it surprising that Jews find the word "Shylock" painful and The Merchant of Venice at best problematic?
On March 4, midway through the play's run, Erdman, Rush, and Levinson gathered in the Rand Theater for a well-attended panel discussion entitled "Shylock and Anti-Semitism: Should The Merchant of Venice Be Performed Today?" The panel was one of a series staged during the production year, some on less loaded subjects such as scene design or choreography, by UMass Theater Education Services.
"I didn't try to say Shakespeare was evil," Erdman told us in April, "and I'm not saying the play shouldn't be performed. I am saying it can't be performed in 1997 without an acknowledgment of these issues."
Rush and Levinson agreed. "The real problem now is how these problematic aspects are portrayed," said Levinson. "You're struggling to find a through-line and a meaning; in some places the text works for you, in some places it works against you."
"One of the things that argues for a complex vision on Shakespeare's part," said Rush, "is that the supposed villain is given perhaps the most eloquent lines in the play the 'Hath not a Jew hands?' speech. If Shylock is such a bad guy, why is he given the most beautiful and touching sections?" There's also more explicit textual evidence of Shakespeare's consciousness of anti-Semitic cruelty: Antonio's casual insults even as he asks for money, Shylock's memory of being spat on in the street.And, says Rush, "I think the whole body of work that Shakespeare created shows that he didn't have an ordinary take on the world, that he was fascinated with things that were completely different on the inside than on the outside." The caskets of gold, silver, and leadwhich Portia's suitors were obliged to choose among are an example of this fascination in this play, he said. Portia's person in her various guises is another. So, in Rush's reading, are all the characters in Merchant: mottled with good and evil, often with the truest nature innermost: Shylock, externally cruel and vindictive, internally wounded beyond endurance; Antonio, Portia, and Bassanio externally self-possessed and virtuous, internally pitiless and grasping.
Ultimately, the nuances ofShakespeare's state of consciousness nearly four hundred years ago are of less interest to these theater people than is what is to be done today with this moving and provocative play. Erdman, the dramaturgical scholar his book Staging The Jew will be published by Rutgers this year was most focused on making sure the complex history and politics of the play inform contemporary productions. Rush, the director, is most focused on "getting the play up on its feet."
He acknowledges the particular problems of the last act of Merchant, which can feel almost intolerable if Shylock is treated sympathetically. After Shylock's yarmulka is ripped off in the courtroom "When we heard the audience gasp at that, we felt we'd done our work," said Rush how can we leave for Portia's countryhouse to see, among other happy couples, Shylock's daughter Jessica, who has robbed him and run away with the gentile Lorenzo?
Rush found his "through-line" for this disturbing last act in Jessica's silence. He noticed that, after the beautiful first few moments, when she and Lorenzo, watching the moon from Portia's terrace ("In such a night...), are interrupted by the return of the several parties of ladies and gentlemen, Jessica is virtually mute.
"She's like a reminder of Shylock," Rush says, describing how he made that reminder poignant, keeping the silent Jessica at the edges of the happy crowd. "She converted, but she's still his flesh and blood. It's as though her having no words, no role, is saying, "You converted, but you're still a Jew. You're always a Jew."
