The Merchant of Venice (19 page)

Two more productions followed before the founding of the modern RSC: Margaret Webster (the first female director of the play in Stratford) with a poorly received Emlyn Williams as Shylock; and Michael Langham’s 1960 production starring Peter O’Toole. O’Toole’s Shylock was singled out for praise: passionate rather than intellectual, he “shows us a human being of stature, driven to breaking point by the inhumanity of others,”
¹³
while the
Evening News
saw him as “a dignified figure from the New rather than Old Testament—a Christ in torment.”
¹⁴
The Old Vic staged the play less successfully in the same season. While Barbara Leigh-Hunt’s Portia was singled out for praise, Robert Speaight criticized the director’s pandering to “the vogue for an eighteenth century
Merchant
.”
¹⁵
Speaight’s remark is symptomatic of the increasing preference for productions that demonstrated the contemporary resonances of the play, as opposed to the historical recreations of the Victorian era.

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.

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
Merchant
s for him:

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:

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

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:

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:

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