Not Shylock - A Shylock
This Sunday, we head up to Stratford for an extended stay, much of the month of August. I’ll be posting reviews of the shows we see while I’m there. In fact, I’m considering doing rather a bit more writing of that sort, and consolidating the work at a new blog. But I’ll let y’all know about that if and when it launches.
In the meantime, last night I finally saw The Merchant of Venice in Central Park, directed by Daniel Sullivan with Al Pacino as Shylock. This is, if I’m keeping proper count, the fifth Merchant I’ve seen, not including film versions. I am, generally, a skeptic of productions that treat the play as something other than a comedy, particularly as a tragedy with Shylock as the tragic hero, and this was an example of same. I feel such productions unbalance the play, making two-thirds of the action seem superfluous, and I also find you have to work hard against the text to make Shylock into anything but a villain at the start.
But this production was an exception to my rule, one in which Shylock did indeed come off as a tragic figure, but that manage to achieve that without working too hard against the text.
In effect, the production said: yes, Shylock is a villain, from the first; an unpleasant, conniving, greedy, cold, miserly, nasty man, bent if not on killing Antonio certainly getting him at his mercy. Before he has suffered the pain and humiliation of his daughter’s flight and theft, Shylock is already plotting villainy, and the casual anti-Semitism and hypocrisy of the Christian society around him does not begin to justify his bad character (nor could it). But once he has suffered that great loss, he turns implacably murderous, and it is Pacino’s achievement that it is when he becomes most plainly bent on murder that we find his Shylock most human, and most sympathetic.
The production deals with the anti-Semitism of the play by subtly reminding us that this is not the story of the Jew but of a Jew – of Shylock – and that even this Jew is no more than human. That’s the point of Shylock’s famous “hath not a Jew eyes” speech – he’s not saying to the Christians that he is as human as they, and not less than human. He’s saying he’s as human as they – and not more than human. They expect him to shrug off wounds that would make a saint bleed – would they do so? Wouldn’t they seek bloody revenge if so provoked? Then why shouldn’t he? He’s only human. And, by the same token (though he doesn’t say this), he’s not a devil, not a supernatural creature of evil. He’s only human.
The reminders that Shylock is just one man, and neither the representative of all Jewry nor some kind of devil, come at three points in the play. First, Tubal, Shylock’s co-religionist, shows alarm when Shylock reveals his vengeful plan. He’s not strong enough to actually object (no objection is in the text, for one thing) but he is obviously scared and disturbed. Second, Shylock himself, at the trial, has to visibly gather his strength to steel himself to do the deed. One has the sense of a man who is fighting his own humane impulses, forcing them down, committing himself voluntarily to a course that, under normal circumstances, he would not consider. This Shylock does not seem to be hesitating because of what Portia says. It’s a drama internal to him, and it takes a great actor like Pacino to pull it off. Finally, the director added a wordless scene after the trial, right before the return to Belmont, depicting the baptism of Shylock. After being immersed, Shylock is helped out of the pool by Tubal and a young Jewish boy, who are clearly willing to help him and take him in even though he has just been cut off from the community by conversion. But Shylock rejects them, and walks off alone, vaguely in the direction of the Christians, but not to join them or to be welcomed by them. While none of this is in the text, and, I would argue, is not really in the spirit of the text as a whole, it’s all stuff you can get away with – it doesn’t obviously run counter to the text. And it does a great deal to make Shylock plausible as a solitary villain, and one with tragic dimension, rather than the embodiment of some ancestral Jewish evil.
As for unbalancing the play, Sullivan deals with this by cutting out much of the comedy and highlighting the problem aspects of the romantic comedy. In particular, Lily Rabe’s Portia goes on a very interesting journey. My own read on the Portia-Bassanio story is rather cynical. He’s a shallow fortune-hunter, and she takes him precisely for his faults as much as his virtues; his shallowness and soft-headedness tell her that he’ll be easily mastered, no threat to her as mistress of her house and of the fortune that he thinks is his. She is no more betrayed by his disposal of the ring than she is doubtful of her inevitable triumph over Shylock: she knows the law, and she knows Bassanio, and the business with the ring is as cunningly-laid a trap for her husband (and for Antonio, who she binds far more effectively than Shylock ever did) as was the trap she laid in court to catch the Jew.
That’s my read from the text. But that’s not what Rabe gives us. Her Portia starts rather innocent, genuinely besotted with Bassanio, and when he does, in fact, give her the ring, she is quietly shattered. She staggers home with Nerissa and wonders how she’ll ever feel sure in her marriage again. It’s Antonio who traps himself, offering himself once more as surety, and this she seizes upon. She ends as the sovereign over all in Belmont, but she doesn’t start there; she goes on quite a journey, in fact. Do I buy it? Not entirely – in particular, I have a hard time squaring the Portia we get at the outset with the woman who so thoroughly triumphs at court, and who is, at the end, able to summon lost fortunes from the deep without a word of explanation. But I’ll admit, Rabe’s is a far more sympathetic and complex character than the Portia I have in mind, and is probably a necessary choice in a production like this that forgoes comedy so as not to have the love story jar next to the downfall of Shylock.
Hamish Linklater’s Bassanio and Byron Jennings’ Antonio gave me more what I expected, and left me well satisfied with what I was given. Jennings makes a rather old Antonio, but I think that’s all to the good – Bassanio becomes his unwitting Bosie, whom his Antonio dotes on manipulatively, wanting nothing more than that the Jew should rip out his heart so that he might lay it at his beloved’s feet. All this is conveyed very subtly, and Bassanio seems blessedly clueless about the whole thing.
Jessica and Lorenzo are a bit more of a problem. Their trajectory is correct – their love curdles almost as soon as they reach Belmont, that much is clear from the text, but what’s missing from their performance is any idea of the source of the sourness that caused it to curdle. She’s Jewish, and he finds he can’t actually deal with that? She realizes he’s just after her money, and feels betrayed? He likes to sleep with the window open but she keeps the window closed? We don’t really have a clue, and do they failure of their romance fails to have meaning. Tacking on a moment of regret for what has happened to her father, meanwhile, which seems to be de riguer these days, always strikes me as rather against the text, but if you’re going to try that you need to set up some basis for that regret in the earlier relationship between father and daughter, which this production does not do.
The rest of the case is generally excellent, particularly the lusty pair of Nerissa (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) and Gratiano (Jesse L. Martin). The only glaring weakness is Jesse Tyler Ferguson’s Launcelot Gobbo, whose only purpose is to serve as comic relief, but who is never actually funny. But given that this production cuts virtually all the jokes, downplays those that remain, and moves at a pace more suited to a romance, or to All’s Well That Ends Well than to a comedy, I’m not sure Ferguson is ultimately to blame.
The set will likely have to be completely redone for the Broadway run to come, but I found it very effective, a series of concentric fences dividing Jewish and Christian Venice. The late-19th century period costumes are elegant, if more flattering to the peacockish men than to the women.
All in all, an exceptionally strong take on the play, particularly given that it had to work uphill against my own predilections, and well worth a turn on Broadway.
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But there is another production, one that looms in my mind’s eye, but that I have never seen, and if nobody does it I’ll eventually have to direct it myself, somehow.
Shylock, in Shakespeare’s original conception, is not a tragic figure. Merchant is a comedy. Shylock is more complex than Don John in Much Ado and more sinister than Malvolio in Twelfth Night, but he is nonetheless structurally their kin. We are meant to laugh at him. I believe that Shakespeare’s audience would have, and did, that they were not really scared of Shylock because they knew he was fated to lose, that it would only be justice if he did. Yes, a lot of what Shakespeare was doing in the play was criticizing Christian society for being mercenary and hypocritical – but when he uses Shylock to make these points, Shylock is playing a Satanic role, God’s prosecutor, convicting (Christian) humanity. He’s not building up Shylock himself into either a genuine adversary to the divine or a human tragic figure.
So how can we recover a truly comic Merchant without simply recreating the anti-Semitism that made the jokes funny in the first place? Well, here’s my idea.
In my mind, I see Shylock in a bright red wig (a symbol of Judas, by the way), in Groucho glasses and mustache, and clownishly ill-fitting clothes. I see him come on stage, lisping his “three thousand ducats” and the audience . . . well, I don’t know what the audience would do. Freak out, I suppose. They wouldn’t know what to make of it. Nervous laughter, I guess, is what you’d mostly get.
But that’s what we should get. This is a comedy, even if it’s now a comedy that should make as distinctly uneasy. All those Jewish actors, from Jacob Adler to Dustin Hoffman, who found tragic dignity in Shylock – I’d like to see one try to find it in this production. That would be a challenge – for us to see the humanity not in a Shylock that is portrayed to work our philo-Semitism, but one that is portrayed almost the exact opposite. It would be like the “If You Could See Her Through My Eyes” number in Cabaret.
I picture one scene in particular, a wordless scene added before Act 2 Scene 5, of Shylock alone in his study, that would give the audience a bit of relief and help them understand what was going on. Shylock would be alone in his study, and would take off the glasses and mustache, take off the wig, slouch in his chair, and look at a picture of his late wife, Leah. And talk to her, in low, inaudible tones. And then he would notice his daughter, Jessica, watching him from the doorway. Flustered, he’d quickly put back on the wig and glasses, don the mask – and she would flee. And then Launcelot Gobbo would come in and we’re into the scene.
Why insert this scene? Three reasons. First, I think it’s important to drive home the alienation between Shylock and Jessica in a way that leaves us sympathetic to both of them. If he dotes on her, we think she’s cruel to flee and steal from him; it stacks the deck in his favor and we have no sympathy for her. If he is miserly with his affection, then we have insufficient sympathy for him – unless that miserliness is grounded. And here it is. And, further, it foreshadows and gives psychological basis for Jessica’s decision to steal her mother’s ring, and then cruelly trade it for a monkey. (“I would not give it for a wilderness of monkeys” – that’s the best line in the whole play, the one that brings the most sympathy to Shylock, the only line that gives us a biographical basis for his character that is other than his Jewishness, and I’d want to build on it.)
Finally, and most importantly, the scene would drive home that being Shylock, playing Shylock, means something for Shylock. This is a role he inhabits. Yes, he looks like he’s playing a clown – maybe he feels he has no choice but to play a clown – but by this point he is choosing to play a clown, a sinister, murderous clown. He needs to put on the mask to defend himself – against Jessica as much as against Antonio and his brethren. If Shylock means something to a Jewish actor, if he means something to a Jewish audience, this is the heart of the meaning – the choice to play this role, to reclaim it, make it something tragic, something with pathos. Can that be done? The production in my mind dramatizes that struggle, the struggle to reclaim Shylock that is the challenge every production of Merchant faces.
It’s a little meta, I know, but I think it could be enormously powerful. Because Shylock is a terrible role to want to put on. No Jew in his right mind should actually want to justify Shylock. But somehow we want to. The play is too strong to be dismissed, and too horrifying to be accepted, and so reclaiming the role seems like the only thing to do. But reclaiming it in the usual way runs the very real risk of justifying Shylock, and that we must never do.
And I think it would be much more effective, if we’re trying to dramatize the bigotry of the Christians, to dress Shylock as a clown, because it makes us complicit. I mean, dressed like that, we think he’s ridiculous. We’re on Gratiano’s side. Not so if Shylock is a pious traditional Jew or a dignified Rothschild.
You know, I may just do it one day. I’ll let you know if I do.
If you want to hear even more of my thoughts about Merchant, my review of the last production at Stratford, from 2007, is here.
I’ve only seen one production of Merchant, one that as far as I can tell was fairly straightforward compared to other ones you describe. The most memorable part of the close of the play was the masturbation joke, the director wasn’t disguising the fact that the play was intended to be lighthearted.
In the treatment of Shylock, two things stuck out: he appeared to be the only character in the play who took his religion seriously, and he was a bigot. I left suspecting he would have managed to alienate his daughter even if he were a member of the dominate religious group of whatever society he lived in. He really was just a villain who happened to be Jewish; his daughter wasn’t presented as sharing any of his flaws.
And I couldn’t help but think at the end that his conversion was probably not sincere, but just a matter of finally going along with what most people in society were doing. This suggests to me that Shakespeare himself thought religion was not to be taken seriously, and that it’s best just to go with the flow of whatever people around you are doing. Not a politically correct message or one I endorse, but not one of crude anti-semitism, either.
Perhaps none of this is in the text of the play, though, and this was just a clever director getting me to see what wasn’t there. I’d be curious to know what you think of this reading.
— Chris Hallquist · Jul 30, 03:47 AM · #
Just got back from Stratford. Plummer in The Tempest was amazing, as was most of the rest of the cast. Kiss Me Kate was the biggest positive surprise for us. A Winter’s Tale was a Shakespeare purists delight. Evita was excellent. Our adventure play was King Of Thieves. Good acting but writing needs buffing. Would be interested in your take on As You Like It. We avoided it and the other folks at our B and B gave it mixed reviews.
Steve
— steve · Jul 30, 04:13 PM · #
Steve: actually, we already saw As You Like It, Kiss Me Kate, A Winter’s Tale and Peter Pan during opening week, but we’re seeing them all again, along with the rest of the season. So don’t worry, you’ll get my take all all of the above.
— Noah Millman · Jul 30, 04:18 PM · #
Chris: I’m always wary of saying that Shakespeare thought this or that about any given topic. You can usually find quotes on both sides.
He certainly has plenty of clerics who are portrayed as villains – but does that reflect anti-religious feeling? anti-Catholic feeling? (said villains are pretty much uniformly Catholic) If the latter, does that reflect Shakespeare’s own views, or the views of his society?
Politics: Shakespeare seems to take a dim view of the mob (see, e.g., Henry VI part 2, the Jack Cade episode, or see the behavior of the mob in Julius Caesar). But he also seems to be highly skeptical of the kind of person who has contempt for the mob (see, e.g., Coriolanus). And he also seems to have a great deal of skepticism of the kind of people who are good at manipulating the mob (Mark Antony in Julius Caesar, Henry V). He gives a magnificent conservative speech about the natural hierarchy in society to Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida – but Ulysses is arguably one of the “bad guys” in that play, assuming they aren’t all bad guys, and, more to the point, it’s hardly clear that his advice is any good.
So I think it’s extremely difficult to say what Shakespeare’s views were on things like politics or religion.
— Noah Millman · Jul 30, 04:38 PM · #
I was not impressed by the production of “Merchant” in the Park, although I did think that the acting was excellent.
Regarding the text, I noticed the production excised Portia’s bigoted remark about non-whites. When expressing her relief that she will not have to marry the Moorish prince, she says:“Let all of his complexion choose me so.”
Why didn’t you mention omission? It is a strange failure for someone as concerned with “the text” as you are.
On another matter, I see no justification for the alienation of the lovers at the end in this production. In Shakespeare’s day, this was a comedy. In comedies, lovers get together at the end. Shakespeare was writing for the audience in his day. Unless of course, he was actually writing for the audience in early twenty-first century New York, but no one knew it until now. (I am so relieved that you and Sullivan are here to tell us.)
Your claims that this is textually justified are silly. Frankly, I have to wonder if you have ever read the text. Thus you write: “Jessica and Lorenzo are a bit more of a problem. Their trajectory is correct – their love curdles almost as soon as they reach Belmont..”
How is it clear from the text that their love curdles? Because Lorenzo compares them to star-crossed lovers such as Troilus and Cressida? In “As You Like It,” Rosalind ridicules Troilus as naive or hopelessly romantic. No doubt, that is a sign buried within the text as well. (Maybe Lorenzo is too much of a romantic.)
Oh, I know. Jessica gets melancholy when she hears sweet music. However, Shakespeare’s characters often have strong emotional responses to music. (Doesn’t Cleopatra refer to music as “moody food?”)In fact, Lorenzo criticizes Shylock because Shylock “hath no music in himself./ Nor is moved with concord of sweet sounds…” Perhaps they are a good match after all. Perhaps you are a pompous jerk.
— Bill · Jul 30, 10:32 PM · #
BTW, we didnt have time for a full tasting tour in the Niagara lakes region, but Malivoire had some nice wines this year. The 2007 Chardonnay and the Riesling icewine were very good.
Steve
— steve · Aug 1, 12:54 AM · #
What’s the current theory on Shakespeare’s upbringing? Do people currently think that he might have been raised a crypto-Catholic? If so, and if he walked away from it, that might explain some of what Chris H read from the play.
— J Mann · Aug 2, 08:32 PM · #
Thanks for such a great post and the review, I am totally impressed! Keep stuff like this coming.
— designer clothes · Aug 4, 08:21 AM · #
“How is it clear from the text that their love curdles?”
They do insult each other several times, but I don’t know whether we are meant to take this seriously or as playful banter. Your reaction seems a bit over-the-top.
— James Kabala · Aug 7, 04:14 PM · #