The Merchant of Venice (18 page)

The performance history of
The Merchant of Venice
has been dominated by the figure of Shylock: no small feat for a character who appears in fewer scenes than almost any other named character and whose role is dwarfed in size by that of Portia. Nevertheless, tradition has it that Richard Burbage, leading player of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, originated the role of Shylock. Quite how the character of the Jewish moneylender was received on stage at the time has been the subject of much debate and controversy. The actor-manager William Poel, in his Elizabethan-practices production of 1898 at St. George’s Hall in London, played the character in the red wig and beard, traditionally associated with Judas Iscariot, on the assumption that Shakespeare merely made use of an available stock type in order that the vice of greed may “be laughed at and defeated, not primarily because he is a Jew, but because he is a curmudgeon.”
¹

While more recent history makes the idea of the Jew as stock villain uncomfortable for modern audiences, it must be remembered that, at the time of original performance, the Jewish people had been officially excluded from England for three hundred years and would not be readmitted until 1655. The play’s original performances can therefore be seen in a context of folk legend and caricature, as had been recently perpetuated by Christopher Marlowe’s
The Jew of Malta
, with its explicitly Machiavellian villain Barabas epitomizing the fashionable type of the cunning Jew. Barabas was one of the great tragedian Edward Alleyn’s leading roles, and may have provided the incentive for Burbage, the other leading actor of the day, to take a more complex spin on the stock Jewish figure. As recently as 2006, New York’s Theater for a New Audience played the two in repertory together, drawing out the links and influences between the plays.

The play includes a part for William Kempe, the company clown, as Lancelet Gobbo (the name interestingly referencing an earlier Kempe role, Launce of
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
) and, in Portia, his greatest challenge for a boy actor so far. Portia’s role, comprising almost a quarter of the play’s entire text, required tremendous skill and range from the young actor, and laid down the groundwork for
the great breeches-clad heroines of the mature comedies, Viola and Rosalind.

The play was played twice at court in February 1605, suggesting a popularity that had kept the play in the company repertory for the best part of a decade, but after this there is no record of the play being performed again in the seventeenth century. The play’s history in the eighteenth century began, as with many of Shakespeare’s works, as an adaptation, George Granville’s
The Jew of Venice
(1701). While the title ostensibly shifts the focus from Antonio to Shylock, the company’s leading actor, Thomas Betterton, took the role of Bassanio. Shylock, on the other hand, was played by Thomas Doggett, an actor best known for low comedy. The adapted play emphasized moral ideals: Shylock was a simple comic villain, Bassanio a heroic and romantic lover.

It was not until 1741 that Shakespeare’s text was restored by Charles Macklin at Drury Lane. Macklin, like Doggett before him, was best known for his comic roles, but he deliberately set out to create a more serious interpretation of Shylock. John Doran, for example, notes that in the trial scene “Shylock was natural, calmly confident, and so terribly malignant, that when he whetted his knife … a shudder went round the house.”
²
This Shylock posed a genuine threat that the earlier comic villains did not, and thus began the process of reimagining
The Merchant of Venice
as more than a straightforward comedy. Macklin performed Shylock until 1789 and redefined the role—and the play—for subsequent generations. To Alexander Pope is attributed the pithy tribute “This is the Jew that Shakespeare drew.”
³

With the notable exception of David Garrick, most of the major actor-managers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries attempted Shylock, with varying degrees of success. In 1814, at the age of twenty-seven, the then-unknown Edmund Kean made his mark at Drury Lane in which he responded to the tradition laid down by Macklin with a new reading of Shylock. Toby Lelyveld tells us “he was willing to see in Shylock what no one but Shakespeare had seen—the tragedy of a man.”
⁴
Heavily influenced by Garrick’s acting style, Kean’s performance took the Romantic preoccupation with individual passion and applied it to Shylock, allowing audiences to experience
sympathy and pity for the antagonist, as William Hazlitt noted in the
Morning Chronicle
: “Our sympathies are much oftener with him than with his enemies.”
⁵

Henry Irving’s production ran for over a thousand performances from 1879 to 1905 in London and America, and its influence is still felt. Irving’s Shylock was a direct descendant of Macklin and Kean’s, consolidating and emphasizing the role as that of a tragic hero. The
Spectator
noted that “here is a man whom none can despise, who can raise emotions both of pity and of fear, and make us Christians thrill with a retrospective sense of shame.”
⁶
The use of “us Christians” is revealing of audience responses to the play until this point: audiences expected to identify themselves with the Venetian Christians, and in opposition to the Jewish villain. Where Kean had begun to experiment with sympathy for the “other,” Irving forced his audiences to take sides with Shylock and be outraged by his treatment.

Irving’s production was additionally noted for the spectacle of its set, which followed the celebrated example of Charles Kean’s 1858 staging by including a full-sized Venetian bridge and canal along which the masquers floated in a gondola. The historical locations of
The Merchant of Venice
have long held a deep fascination for directors and designers, and attempts to re-create elements of Venice have recurred throughout the play’s performance history: even the production at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2007 featured a miniature Bridge of Sighs extending into the yard. This fascination with the city reached its apogee in Michael Radford’s 2005 film (see below).

Irving’s Portia was Ellen Terry, the latest in a long line of prestigious Portias including Kitty Clive (1741), Sarah Siddons (1786), and Ellen Tree (1858, opposite her husband, Kean). However, the longstanding focus on Shylock had had the negative impact of restricting the opportunities available to even the better actresses. Act 5 was often cut during the nineteenth century in order to focus on Shylock’s tragedy, along with the scenes featuring Morocco and Aragon, while much of the Bassanio and Portia plot was mercilessly pruned. Irving himself, in order to present the play as unambiguous tragedy, often replaced Act 5 with
Iolanthe
, a one-act vehicle for Terry which allowed her to finish the evening’s entertainment without distracting from Shylock’s tragedy.

1.
Old Gobbo in Charles Kean’s 1858 production, with stage set representing the real Venice.

Despite this, Terry’s Portia set a precedent for imagining the heroine as independent and self-determining. Where Portia had usually been played as entirely subject to the fate dictated by her father, Terry gave reviewers the impression that she would take matters into her own hands if the man she loved failed to choose correctly. She also
allowed Portia to spontaneously come up with the blood–flesh resolution to Shylock’s demand in a last-minute moment of inspiration, demonstrating a greater presence of mind and inventiveness than usual for the character. With Portia’s independence of spirit established, the character began to take control of her own story: Fabia Drake’s Portia, at Stratford in 1932, began the tradition of giving clues to Bassanio by arranging the emphasis of the “bred-head-nourishèd-fed” sounds in the song that is played as he chooses, thereby suggesting the rhyme with “lead,” and in doing so became manager of her own fate.

This 1932 production, directed by Theodore Komisarjevsky, subverted the established chain of actor-manager productions that had followed in Irving’s vein. Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s 1908 Stratford production was characterized primarily by its elaborate scenic effects, and Frank Benson continued the tradition of Victorian
Merchant
s as late as May 1932. Two months later, Komisarjevsky’s production turned the play into carnival. The acclaimed Russian director had been invited to mark the opening of the new Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, and did so with a production that satirized the lovers, utilized eclectic surrealist sets and, in the words of the
Daily Herald
, “had the courage to show Shylock what I always thought him to be—a terrible old scoundrel.”
⁷
1932 also saw John Gielgud direct the play at the Old Vic, with Malcolm Keen as Shylock and Peggy Ashcroft as Portia.
The Times
criticized both 1932 productions for not treating the play as “sacrosanct,” particularly disliking the “air of burlesque” that Gielgud gave to the Belmont scenes, designed to give greater tragic weight to the Shylock scenes.
⁸

The play’s early twentieth-century history is unavoidably tainted by the horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust. The oft-quoted belief that the play was appropriated as Nazi propaganda somewhat overstates the case: most pertinently, in Germany there were no major productions of the play for over thirty years after 1927, a production in which Fritz Kortner was not allowed to play the “inhuman” character he felt Shakespeare intended Shylock to be. However, productions of the play during the prewar and war years were inevitably political. In 1943, the Vienna Burgtheater presented Lotha Müthel’s fiercely anti-Semitic production, which made
Jessica “acceptable” by turning her into the daughter of an affair between Shylock’s wife and a non-Jew. By contrast, Leopold Jessner’s Hebrew-language production of 1936 at the Habimah Theatre of Tel Aviv “occurred at an heroic moment, where national pathos was a standard theme.”
⁹
Jessner was a Jewish exile from Berlin, yet even this production was vigorously protested, culminating in a public mock trial that vindicated Shakespeare from accusations of anti-Semitism. Tel Aviv hosted subsequent productions of the play in 1953 (Tyrone Guthrie), 1972 (Yossi Yzraeli), and 1980 (Barry Kyle), the last aiming to explore how “Shylock easily falls prey to revenge in succumbing to the logic and mentality of terrorism.”
¹⁰
The play retains its potential for controversial and insightful political comment.

Productions of the play in North America have been similarly overshadowed by the Holocaust, and new productions continue to draw complaints from Jewish groups and campaigners, meaning that the treatment of Shylock is rarely unsympathetic. Fears about the play’s potential to negatively influence spectators were sensationalized: during a performance at the 1984 Stratford Ontario Festival, a group of schoolchildren threw pennies at Jewish students, an incident which resulted in calls for the play to be banned from the Festival. The play was not mounted by an American company between 1930 and 1953, but thereafter grew in popularity and was mounted regularly across the country for the remainder of the century, acting to reaffirm American ideals of racial equality. In 1957, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival staged an Elizabethan-practices production that revived the red-wigged Shylock of William Poel: here, however, it was deliberately intended to be repugnant. Six years later, George Tabori’s adaptation at the Stockbridge Playhouse in Massachusetts turned the play into an entertainment put on by concentration camp prisoners for their Nazi guards. Alvin Epstein switched continually between his roles as Jewish prisoner-actor and Shylock, utilizing Shakespeare’s lines to articulate the prisoner’s anger at his guards. During the trial scene, he cast aside his assumed role and attacked a guard with a real knife substituted for the prop one, and was killed in retaliation by the guards, bringing both the inner play and Tabori’s production crashing to a close.

The most high-profile American casting of the latter half of the twentieth century was Dustin Hoffman, appearing first in London and then transferring to Washington and New York in Peter Hall’s 1989 staging. While Hoffman’s presence resulted in the play breaking West End box-office records for a straight play, Hall’s interpretation was found dull and lacking in insight, and the
National Review
felt that Hoffman’s Shylock “seems to have wandered in from a different production.”
¹¹
Peter Sellars’ mounting for the Goodman Theater in Chicago in 1994 set the play in Venice Beach, California, with Latino actors as the Venetians, black actors in the Jewish roles, and Asian-Americans as the Belmont characters. This production lasted for over four hours and was unpopular with audiences, despite its laudable intentions.

The play maintained its popularity in Stratford-upon-Avon following Komisarjevsky’s production, often opening the festival season; Iden Payne’s stagings were revived frequently between 1935 and 1942. The star performances of Michael Redgrave and Peggy Ashcroft (still playing Portia twenty-one years after her Old Vic appearance) dominated coverage of Dennis Carey’s 1953 production, with critics approving the contrast between Redgrave’s “snarling and sneering and spitting old snake”
¹²
and Ashcroft’s warm and dignified Portia.