Read The Merchant of Venice Online
Authors: William Shakespeare
The Merchant of Venice (20 page)
Stewart’s Shylock was in effect a “bad Jew,” totally motivated by money with little regard to the ethics of his religion. In this production the words “Jew” and “Christian” were merely labels, with neither set of characters demonstrating any of the traits of their creeds. Set in the late nineteenth century,
The Christians are, on the whole, a spoiled, boorish bunch, much given to throwing bread-rolls, shooting off cap-pistols, and other types of horseplay; and the shock provoked by their deep, instinctive prejudice is the shock of recognition, because they wear the suits some of our generation’s grandfathers wore at public school or Oxbridge. The upper crust yob Gratiano, whose pet idiocy is dog-imitations, represents this faction at its most gruesome. And yet behind the witty, teasing front displayed by Patrick Stewart’s Shylock, there festers a no less nasty temperament …
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One of the RSC’s most controversial productions, directed by Bill Alexander in 1987,
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Patrick Stewart as Shylock: not so obviously Jewish in appearance, but unashamedly motivated by money.
grappled with the play’s offensive subject matter more daringly than any production in recent memory. Refusing to either rehabilitate Shylock as the play’s moral standard-bearer … or to treat him from a safe historical distance as a comic “Elizabethan” Jew … Alexander courted controversy, seeming almost to invite accusations of racism. The controversy sprang in part from his refusal to honour the distinctions between romance and realism, comedy and tragedy, sympathy for and aversion to Shylock, from which stage interpreters have traditionally felt they had to choose. By intensifying the problematic nature of the text, Alexander modulated the dynamics of audience response: he goaded audiences with stereotypes only to probe the nature of their own prejudices; he confronted
them with alienation in different guises in order to reveal the motives of scapegoatism. His Shylock was grotesque—at once comic, repulsive, and vengeful. Yet he was made so in part by those Venetians who need someone on whom to project their own alienation; Venetians who, in their anxiety over sexual, religious, and mercantile values, were crucial to the transaction Alexander worked out between Shakespeare’s text and contemporary racial tensions.
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Antony Sher, who played Shylock as a very exotic and very foreign-looking Jew, stated:
There have been a lot of productions set in the turn of the century—or in the last century—where he’s dressed in a frock coat like everybody else and is an assimilated Jew. To me, that is nonsense, because clearly he sticks out like a sore thumb in society … We chose to make him a Turkish Jew using a Turkish accent. What we were doing with that was trying to extend the racism and by just making him a very unassimilated foreigner, very foreign, rather than very Jewish, we hoped to slightly broaden the theme of racism. We also wanted to make the racism as explicit and as brutal as described in the text, but never normally done. You don’t normally see Christians spitting at him or kicking him or doing all the things that he says they do.
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The first appearance of Sher’s Shylock was of him
turbaned, baggy-panted and first seen squatting cross legged on an ottoman in his black tent … Mr Sher’s Shylock also is tremendously volatile: when he describes “the work of generation” among Laban’s sheep, he pummels his left palm with his right fist in mimic procreation. When Antonio makes the fateful bargain, Mr Sher runs his hand over the outline of his body like a butcher sizing-up a carcass. There is nothing sentimental about this Shylock: he is out for blood. But you understand why, when Antonio picks up his abacus, hurls it to the floor and spits at his departing figure on “Hie thee, gentle Jew.” Too
much? Not if you look at the text, which tells us that Antonio publicly calls Shylock a misbeliever and cut-throat dog at every opportunity. The trial scene is more exciting than I ever remember it. The appearance of this Shylock almost provokes a race-riot, with the Christians indulging in anti-Semitic chants. Tubal has even providentially brought a cloth with which his colleague can wipe the spit from his face. As Mr Sher prepares to extract the pound of flesh, he intones a Hebrew sacrificial prayer specially invented for this production.
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In this volatile setting Shylock’s defiance almost represented “a perverted act of courage.”
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Nevertheless, Shylock was “not a tragic hero: he is proof that racism breeds revenge.”
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According to the critics, there was more spit in this production than in any other before, or since. The spit directed at the Jew was an important symbol of hatred and returned in the trial scene in which
Shylock is seen whetting his knife
with his own spit
. This image might well be the visual equivalent of his line: “The villainy you teach me I will execute.”
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Kit Surrey’s design ensured that the audience did not at any stage forget the racial tensions affecting the behavior of the play’s characters:
The back wall was crumbling plaster broken away to reveal the brickwork beneath, and on that wall were two images of religious conflict: an ornate shrine for the Madonna and a Star of David daubed in yellow paint. The Venice scenes were dimly lit through smoke to suggest danger and decay. By contrast Belmont was lit brilliantly … [however], the image of Belmont was marred by the presence of the back wall: by not having the two warring images removed, there could never be a true sense of peace.
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Portia offered no redemption from this brutality, racism, and underlying sense of conflict:
Deborah Findlay’s intriguing Portia is a tart, astringent figure constantly boxing people’s ears and guilty, to put it mildly, of social tactlessness, in dismissing Morocco with “Let all of his complexion choose me so” in front of her own black servant.
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[She] has nothing of the healer, or seer, or Desdemona in her. She wants her husband white, bright, and speaking the right Latin tongue … Even if the blood beneath everyone’s skin is red, her father could surely not have wanted all her elegant curls, flounced dresses and milky looks to be married to a black face. She cuffs her Negro servant with a relish which looks customary, and she keeps a polite but distinguishing distance from Lorenzo’s new bride.
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Findlay found this too harsh a reading of the character and after the play transferred to London, changed her performance to what she believed was more in line with Shakespeare’s original conception:
As an experienced actress she felt that she had a right to the part, that it had an essence which she had intuited: “Portia is never mean. Any choice you make about motivation for this character has to be made with all the generosity of spirit that you can muster. She is as loving, as intelligent, as witty, as brave, as compassionate, as everything as you can make her.” Who is right here? The actress who with all her talent, training, and experience undertakes the part and inhabits it as it makes sense to her, or the director whose vision of the whole play necessitates a re-vision of the heroine? There is of course no simple answer, though the problem is peculiar to the twentieth century and the age of the director.
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Bill Alexander’s brutal reading of the play left the audience without a redeeming character. Most other modern productions have been less clear-cut in their depictions, but have opted for psychological depth and elements of sympathy to be found in key love relationships.
Both Portia and Jessica’s lives are governed by overprotective and domineering fathers—the decree of one and the finances of the other act as the catalyst for the action of the play. Are Portia and Jessica viewed as commodities by their fathers, or are they genuinely concerned about their welfare? What effect does this have on the characters of their daughters?
When playing Shylock, David Suchet described the importance of the one domestic scene Shakespeare gives us of his home life:
Shakespeare gives us the shortest scene in the play, which is the domestic relationship between Shylock and Jessica and none of it suggests her life is hell. It is equally wrong to impose such an interpretation of Jessica, and it is also wrong to show a great deal of love because that is not there either. But because of there being a third person present all the time, Gobbo, it is not anyway just a straight scene between father and daughter, it is elevated by the presence of the third person. You see Shylock hesitating as to whether or not to go to dinner, disciplining Jessica over not looking on the Masques, shutting the windows and doors and so on and leaving Jessica to look after the house. She is, for him, both wife and daughter … There are thousands of boys and girls today who want to run away from home and live with someone with whom they’ve fallen in love. Your sympathies can lie either way. He has met these men in the street who, he realizes, asked him to dinner so his daughter could be taken away. I don’t think this is the moment for a great speech of sympathy about the race. He lets out a great stream of bitterness, anger and disillusion about mankind … This is not the same Shylock we have seen before.
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Does Shakespeare give us enough evidence to judge Shylock’s emotional capabilities? Patrick Stewart believed that with regards to Jessica,
The real, natural warm, human, affectionate, loving responses have been cauterised in the man and she is a victim of it. So it is impossible for him to show the undoubted love that lies there
underneath. It’s so far down it can never be tapped. In our production … we had a controversial moment when I struck her very hard. After the blow I made some attempt at reconciliation … But by then the damage had been done and she was bound to reject him.
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In Gregory Doran’s 1997 production, actor Philip Voss
had come to excuse Shylock’s behaviour towards Jessica as deriving from the absence of a mother’s moderating influence … [We’ve] decided—that Shylock’s wife died about five years before—making Jessica, I think, about thirteen. To explain how Jessica has come to loathe her father so much, you need a certain amount of time for his oppressive behaviour to have affected her to that degree. Because, I mean, I see Shylock as a perfectly nice man … The reason that Jessica hates him, I think, is because he is oppressive, because he is a widower, because he has lost his wife, and that she is the woman in the house and he has just demanded too much of her, both in her religion and domestically. And then in every way he has absolutely fed off her, I think. And, if she’s that age, she just wants to get away—the house is hell, because it’s no fun …
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Voss’s Shylock was destroyed by the loss of his daughter (rather than his ducats). Doran intensified the audience’s awareness of Shylock’s pain by having him witness her elopement:
Shylock ran into the raucous and nightmarish carnival which had modulated grotesquely from the same masque that he had watched as an entertainment laid on for his meal with Bassanio and Antonio. Apparently coming home after leaving the Christians, Voss’s Shylock stumbled unwittingly into the obscene and drunken cavorting of the Christians’ street party. Attempting without success to avoid the lunging pigs’ heads, the old man was jostled and pushed around on the stage, until, at a point when the goading was at its height, the music stopped and he suddenly saw his daughter, dressed improperly
in boy’s clothes and carried high on her lover’s shoulders. Screaming her name, he was dragged into his house and spun around as it revolved in a nightmare sequence which saw him thrown from one wall to another as his daughter made her escape.
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Emma Handy as Jessica, “who has come to loathe her father,” an “oppressive” Philip Voss as Shylock, in Gregory Doran’s 1997 production.
In David Thacker’s 1993 modern dress production, he included an extra scene in which Shylock was seen looking lovingly at his wife’s picture while listening to classical music. Shylock’s grief and loneliness at the loss of his wife signaled his capacity for love and heightened the audience’s sympathy for him. It also threw “an enormous light on the bond between Jessica and her father”:
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