The Merchant of Venice (26 page)

I found and read the papal bulls which from the Inquisition onward had been issuing orders to kill Jews. In Pisa and many different places they put them on bonfires and burned them. Venice didn’t—why? Because Venice understood that they needed these people, because they spoke many languages so they could speak to the traders and pedlars and businessmen from all over the world. So there is built into the play that sense of mercantile life. Before I’ve even spoken a word, I find all that stuff really exciting. Context and history, personal and emotional. The signals and the clues are all from the text, never in spite of it, but they lead you back and then you can fill out what Shakespeare has done. I always find it fascinating how Shakespeare adapted and changed his sources, in this case
Il Pecorone
. The changes he made are very revealing: what did he keep, and what didn’t he? The fact that he pushes the trial to go in a particular direction, and Antonio forces Shylock to become a Christian and pushes the events of the play away from the original story, tells us that Shakespeare is interested in certain things. All of those things are very important. A lot of people say, “This is all directors’ stuff.” Absolute nonsense. Any thinking, feeling, intelligent human being wants to understand the context, and I think that division between acting and directing is just ridiculous.

What was your take on the accusation that the representation of the part is anti-Semitic?

AS:
I think it is as wrong to call
Merchant
anti-Semitic as it is to call
Othello
racist. The two plays examine these issues—anti-Semitism and racism—in a tough and uncomfortable way, but without ever condoning or promoting them. Yet
Merchant
’s flaw remains its silly Act 5, which seems to round off the dark and complex story in a totally trivial way. It’s one of those rare occasions in Shakespeare where a modern audience—and specifically a post-Holocaust audience—has great difficulty accepting what he’s written. A clear case, I think, of a play hijacked by history.

HG:
In very simple language, I don’t agree with it. I think it perpetuates an image to some degree, but is showing the Welsh and the Scotsmen in
Henry V
anti-Welsh or anti-Scot? No, it shows the rivalries, the clichés, the stereotypes, and the bitterness in the Elizabethan world, when everybody was about to go to war. I think what is, to me, overwhelming is that Shakespeare goes out of his way to show Shylock in a personal context, which doesn’t explain or completely exonerate in any way his behavior, but it does contextualize it, and it does humanize it, and he gives him, like he gives Queen Katherine in
Henry VIII
, a public trial. If you think of the big trial scenes they usually give the foreigner a great voice actually. He doesn’t allow us just to laugh at Shylock, although there is some of that, or to show him merely in his appalling behavior; he also says that this is a man with knowledge and insight and reason to think and feel and behave in the way that he does. There are certain key choices that you’ve got to make if you play this role. What’s the learning curve? I think that he may be in very few scenes, but he has absolutely huge triggers before and during them. I believe he finds it not so easy to actually kill someone. Some people become so psychopathic in their hate that they can just stab a knife into somebody without even thinking about it. I don’t believe he’s become that, because all of his other self is justice, decency, control; and although he’s got to a point of doing something appalling, I believe he has that moment of doubt. It might only be a millisecond, but he does.

Hamlet is not always played as peculiarly Danish, Macbeth does not always have a Scottish accent … could you imagine a production in which Shylock is not peculiarly Jewish?

AS:
Shylock’s Jewishness is far more critical than Macbeth’s Scottishness or Hamlet’s Danishness; one half of
Merchant
’s plot is fueled by the hatred between the Christians and the Jews. The question is, how Jewish to make him? I believe very Jewish—without, of course, spilling over into caricature. In Trevor Nunn’s 1999 National Theatre production, set in 1930s Europe, Henry Goodman played a very Jewish Shylock with total authenticity, and the result was superb. You both believed in him as a three-dimensional man, yet also understood that when the Christians looked at him they saw one of those Nazi cartoons of verminous Jews. At the other extreme, there was Jonathan Miller’s 1970 National Theatre production with Laurence Olivier. Backed by his Jewish director, Olivier chose to play a totally assimilated Jew, a sophisticated Disraeli-type figure (the setting was Victorian). I understood their point—the enemies of the real Disraeli (who wasn’t just assimilated, but had actually converted to Christianity) often reverted to anti-Semitic abuse when they were on the attack—yet it was hard to believe that this particular Shylock had ever been spat upon. And it is this ugly, visceral little act which is, I believe, crucial to his side of the story. But how it relates to the other side, Portia’s fairy-tale adventures, this simply mystifies me. When we began work on our RSC production in 1987, I was convinced that Bill Alexander, Deborah Findlay (Portia), and I would find a way of marrying the two halves, and yet when we finished two years later, after the Stratford and Barbican runs, I then felt it was impossible. I look forward to being proved wrong one day …

HG:
Now I know it’s a multilayered issue, but yes I can. See, there’s a principle here. If you say no black person should ever play Shylock or no white person should ever play Othello, to me you can’t do theater. What’s the point of it? Being the other, undergoing their experience, that is the journey of theater. Now of course we live in an age where, thank heavens, black people can play kings of England and that’s great, but we have to acknowledge that in the context of the time
those prejudices did exist. It’s wonderful that we’re now growing as human beings and we can be color blind, but the plays do come from an era when people were not. It’s as if Shakespeare could only have written about people living in Stratford-upon-Avon or London—it’s a very far-reaching point, this. How could he write about all these different cultures? He can only
imagine
them. He might see some at court when he went to perform at Whitehall, he might have met some at Stratford Town Hall when his dad was hosting events. But then he captures those people and gives us characters. If he’s got the right to
write
them, then we’ve got the right to
act
them. The problem is, does Shylock have to be the clichéd version of what a Jew is? Of course not. That’s why I fully accepted the version of Olivier, even though it lacked certain things. Yes, the play does take on added (I’m not being naive) intensity and emotional authenticity and veracity if you feel in its context, as we did in Europe in the 1930s: that felt right. But if you imagine Jonathan Miller or Freddie Raphael or hundreds of modern Jewish writers or eminent lawyers or doctors or journalists, etc., etc., being Shylock, they might just speak like I’m speaking now. The issue is, do they have to have a funny accent, do they have to use their hands in a certain way …?

That’s the very dangerous thing with Shylock and people bend over backward to try and negotiate that. I went out of my way to show that he lives very religiously, he’s devout. But anybody can do that research, you don’t have to be Jewish to do that. If I’m playing Macbeth I’ll look into understanding the things about his life, and his wife, and his society, and Scots, and the hatred of England, and lairds and lords. So yes I can. The question is the quality that it would bring to the work. And the trouble with Shylock is that he embraces and encourages—even tempts—extreme ways of playing him. Or you fall into the other trap of desperately trying not to be Jewish, make it absolutely, completely modern, just somebody who is wronged and is completely like all the other people in his community. It’s a fascinating subject, and context and period is absolutely crucial in this play—more than in any other play, I think. We must remember that the Nazis did dozens and dozens of productions of this play during the era because they thought it was useful, but they cut out all things that were humane. Shakespeare didn’t, he put them in.

William Shakespeare was an extraordinarily intelligent man who was born and died in an ordinary market town in the English Midlands. He lived an uneventful life in an eventful age. Born in April 1564, he was the eldest son of John Shakespeare, a glove maker who was prominent on the town council until he fell into financial difficulties. Young William was educated at the local grammar in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, where he gained a thorough grounding in the Latin language, the art of rhetoric, and classical poetry. He married Ann Hathaway and had three children (Susanna, then the twins Hamnet and Judith) before his twenty-first birthday: an exceptionally young age for the period. We do not know how he supported his family in the mid-1580s.

Like many clever country boys, he moved to the city in order to make his way in the world. Like many creative people, he found a career in the entertainment business. Public playhouses and professional full-time acting companies reliant on the market for their income were born in Shakespeare’s childhood. When he arrived in London as a man, sometime in the late 1580s, a new phenomenon was in the making: the actor who is so successful that he becomes a “star.” The word did not exist in its modern sense, but the pattern is recognizable: audiences went to the theater not so much to see a particular show as to witness the comedian Richard Tarlton or the dramatic actor Edward Alleyn.

Shakespeare was an actor before he was a writer. It appears not to have been long before he realized that he was never going to grow into a great comedian like Tarlton or a great tragedian like Alleyn. Instead, he found a role within his company as the man who patched up old plays, breathing new life, new dramatic twists, into tired repertory pieces. He paid close attention to the work of the
university-educated dramatists who were writing history plays and tragedies for the public stage in a style more ambitious, sweeping, and poetically grand than anything that had been seen before. But he may also have noted that what his friend and rival Ben Jonson would call “Marlowe’s mighty line” sometimes faltered in the mode of comedy. Going to university, as Christopher Marlowe did, was all well and good for honing the arts of rhetorical elaboration and classical allusion, but it could lead to a loss of the common touch. To stay close to a large segment of the potential audience for public theater, it was necessary to write for clowns as well as kings and to intersperse the flights of poetry with the humor of the tavern, the privy, and the brothel: Shakespeare was the first to establish himself early in his career as an equal master of tragedy, comedy, and history. He realized that theater could be the medium to make the national past available to a wider audience than the elite who could afford to read large history books: his signature early works include not only the classical tragedy
Titus Andronicus
but also the sequence of English historical plays on the Wars of the Roses.

He also invented a new role for himself, that of in-house company dramatist. Where his peers and predecessors had to sell their plays to the theater managers on a poorly paid piecework basis, Shakespeare took a percentage of the box-office income. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men constituted themselves in 1594 as a joint stock company, with the profits being distributed among the core actors who had invested as sharers. Shakespeare acted himself—he appears in the cast lists of some of Ben Jonson’s plays as well as the list of actors’ names at the beginning of his own collected works—but his principal duty was to write two or three plays a year for the company. By holding shares, he was effectively earning himself a royalty on his work, something no author had ever done before in England. When the Lord Chamberlain’s Men collected their fee for performance at court in the Christmas season of 1594, three of them went along to the Treasurer of the Chamber: not just Richard Burbage the tragedian and Will Kempe the clown, but also Shakespeare the scriptwriter. That was something new.

The next four years were the golden period in Shakespeare’s career, though overshadowed by the death of his only son Hamnet,
aged eleven, in 1596. In his early thirties and in full command of both his poetic and his theatrical medium, he perfected his art of comedy, while also developing his tragic and historical writing in new ways. In 1598, Francis Meres, a Cambridge University graduate with his finger on the pulse of the London literary world, praised Shakespeare for his excellence across the genres:

For Meres, as for the many writers who praised the “honey-flowing vein” of
Venus and Adonis
and
Lucrece
, narrative poems written when the theaters were closed due to plague in 1593–94, Shakespeare was marked above all by his linguistic skill, by the gift of turning elegant poetic phrases.