The Jew in the Spotlight

The Merchant of Venice has been performed more than any of Shakespeare’s plays except Hamlet. It has also been the most reviled and reinvented, thanks to its portrayal of a certain Jewish moneylender. Shylock has swollen in our imaginations to become the star of a show in which he was written as a secondary part. But beneath four hundred years of hatred and bravura lies a more elusive, delicately crafted play than the rough-and-tumble of the “Jewish question” will ever allow.

In 1981, when PBS announced plans to broadcast the BBC’s production of The Merchant of Venice, the Anti-Defamation League sought an injunction to prevent the transmission on the grounds that the play might incite racial hatred against Jewish Americans. Their action was not without precedent. Nineteen years earlier, the New York Board of Rabbis successfully prevented the national televising of Joseph Papp’s production of Merchant with George C. Scott as Shylock, which had already been lambasted by critics and religious leaders when it opened in Central Park. “Many of the lines were embarrassing, vicious and infectious,” wrote Guy Savino in the Newark Evening News. Rabbi Louis Newman of Congregation Rodeph Shalom on the Upper West Side denounced the play as “hate-provoking” and “obnoxious” and preached a sermon entitled “Shylock in Central Park–a Municipal and Cultural Mistake.” After much public debate and lengthy, angry correspondence in The New York Times, Papp and the television executives agreed to abandon the proposed national broadcast and air the program on New York stations alone.

It is no surprise that in the decades since the Second World War, The Merchant of Venice has received an equivocal reception. While the Anti-Defamation League was attempting to halt broadcast of the BBC production, the British playwright Arnold Wesker wrote an article in The Guardian describing the play as “a hateful, ignorant portrayal” that “confirms and feeds those whose anti-Semitism is dormant.” It has become common for directors approaching Merchant to recontextualize the play’s perceived bigotry by invoking images of Nazi persecution: in Bill Alexander’s production for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1987, a lynch mob hurtled through the streets of Venice spraying swastikas on walls and chanting anti-Jewish slogans, while in 1989 Peter Hall surrounded Shylock with a spitting, cursing bevy of Christians who provoked Dustin Hoffman’s temperate moneylender to a justifiable fury.

The irony is that, by seeking to recast The Merchant of Venice in an ideologically acceptable form, such revisionist productions are compelled to focus all their attention on those parts of the text that today seem most problematic. Shylock, who appears in just five of the play’s twenty scenes, is, as we shall see, a subsidiary character in Merchant; to judge from the reviews of major post-war productions, he might have been the only character on stage. Many of the world’s finest actors have tackled the role–Lawrence Olivier and Morris Carnovsky, Warren Mitchell and Antony Sher–but we remember nothing of the actors who played their Bassanios, Antonios, and Portias, the parts that, by virtue of their length alone, might ordinarily receive top billing.

As if to prove that we are most fascinated by what most disgusts us, Arnold Wesker himself wrote a play about Shylock, first produced in Stockholm in 1976. The history of The Merchant of Venice is filled with such contradictions. There is, for instance, a strong tradition of Hebrew and Yiddish productions that portray Shylock as a misunderstood victim of anti-semitic persecution. One of the finest actors of the Yiddish theater in New York, Jacob Adler, played Shylock as a noble patriarch–a man, he said, “who is rooted in life and has grown strong in it.”

In 1903 Adler performed Shylock on Broadway, speaking Yiddish while the rest of his cast spoke English. Less than four decades later, the role had become a significant weapon in the armory of Nazi propaganda. A review of one production of the play described Shylock as “a pathological image of the East European Jewish type, expressing all its inner and outer uncleanliness, emphasizing danger through humor.”

The Second World War may have adjusted the focus of our interest in The Merchant of Venice, but the tradition of Shylock-centered production began long before the Holocaust. Actors from Edwin Booth in London to Ira Aldridge in New York used the role as a star turn, frequently cutting the fifth act of the play from which Shylock is absent and inserting additional scenes to heighten the impact of their performance. The most famous Shylock of the nineteenth century was Henry Irving who, according to one observer, played the part as “the only gentleman in the play, and most ill-used.” George Bernard Shaw was less than enthusiastic about Irving’s interpretation, remarking famously that his “huge and enduring success as Shylock was due to his absolutely refusing to allow Shylock to be the discomforted villain of the piece. The Merchant of Venice became ‘The Martyrdom of Irving,’ which was, it must be confessed, far finer than ‘The Tricking of Shylock.'”

But to what extent does a performance of Shylock that heightens the character’s tragic nobility require the suppression of Shakespeare’s text? Although the Jewish moneylender was born of a medieval comic tradition, we know little about early performances of the role. It is not even certain which of Shakespeare’s actors first created the part; conflicting traditions assign the honor to Richard Burbage, the tragedian who performed Othello and King Lear, and to Will Kemp, the company buffoon. The earliest surviving account of a production of the play suggests that Shylock has long been seen as an ambiguous character. Nicholas Rowe, Shakespeare’s first editor and biographer, watched the role performed by Thomas Doggett, a celebrated clown, and later wrote: “Though we have seen that play received and acted as a comedy, and the part of the Jew performed by an excellent comedian, yet I cannot but think it was designed tragically by the author. There appears in it such a deadly spirit of revenge, such a savage fierceness and fellness, and such a bloody designation of cruelty and mischief, as cannot agree either with the style or characters of comedy.”

Is The Merchant of Venice a comedy or a tragedy? Is Shylock, in Jacob Adler’s words, a man of “high intellect and proud convictions” or an embodiment of evil, a savage devil of revenge? The anxiety experienced by Rowe is not uncommon among audiences, for Merchant defies easy categorization. The play appears to embrace every dramatic genre–comedy and tragedy, romance and melodrama–a dramatic balancing act that suggests the operation of narrative strategies more complex than might be suggested by the heavy-handed approach of recent Shylock-centered productions.

The structure of The Merchant of Venice incorporates two primary narratives: the Antonio plot, in which a merchant, thinking he has lost his fortune at sea, discovers that his ships have miraculously been saved, and the Bassanio/Portia plot, in which a young nobleman, having squandered his inheritance, seeks to marry a wealthy heiress.

The exposition, development, and resolution of these two narratives, neither of which directly concerns the character of Shylock, provide the essential structure of the text. Woven into, and frequently interrupting, this structure is a mosaic of other classical and medieval narrative subplots. The play contains at least eleven of these subsidiary fables, among them the casket plot, in which Portia’s father demands that his daughter marry the suitor who correctly answers a riddle; the flesh-bond stipulated by Shylock as security against his loan to Antonio; the fable of the servant who flees his cantankerous master to seek employment from a young nobleman; the recognition plot, in which the blind Old Gobbo is reunited with his son Launcelot (a motif Shakespeare employs to greater effect in King Lear); the disguise plot, in which Portia dresses up as a young lawyer to rescue her husband’s “dearest friend”; the ring trick that forms most of the play’s fifth act; and the revenge plot, in which a wronged man, his daughter and riches stolen from him and his faith reviled, seeks a terrible revenge on his aggressors. All these fables are familiar stocks-in-trade from medieval romance and classical literature and all, incidentally, touch on the corrupting power of wealth, central to The Merchant of Venice.

In this matrix of interdependent narrative motifs, the principal characters of Merchant play many parts. Shylock is not only the intractable, bloodthirsty usurer of the flesh-bond fable but also the abandoned father in the revenge plot and a Jewish businessman forced to compromise his beliefs and his fortune. Portia may be the passive trophy of the casket plot, but she serves more active character functions as the male impersonator in the disguise plot, the artful wife in the fable of the ring trick, and the bearer of extraordinary news who reveals to Antonio that his ships have been saved.

These simple narrative motifs establish patterns of anticipation in an audience; the protagonist of a revenge tragedy is expected to behave one way, a suitor to the hand of a young princess in quite another. As Dudley Andrew remarks in Concepts in Film Theory (1984), viewers of a play or film are adept at synthesizing expectation based on their a priori knowledge of the genre they are watching. Andrew defines genres as “specific networks of formulas which deliver a certified product to the waiting customer.” When the formula changes, as it does frequently in The Merchant of Venice, audience members are required to amend their expectations of the narrative and character structures unfolding before them.

Such protean characterization, where one character can exist on several narrative planes simultaneously, gives rise to a subjective model of dramatic psychology that is strikingly postmodern. Shylock’s scene with Tubal at the opening of Act Three is a case in point. Virtually every line in this remarkable dialogue switches Shylock’s role from antagonist to protagonist and back again as he plays first the malevolent usurer, cackling with pleasure as he plans to “plague” and “torture” Antonio, then the wretched, broken old man, abandoned by his daughter and utterly alone in a bigoted, hostile world. An audience is hard-pressed to keep up with this theatrical sleight of hand in which Shylock is essentially fulfilling two dramatic functions in a single scene: the tragic figure of loss and despair brilliantly captured by Henry Irving and the odious caricature of a grasping usurer that feeds claims of the play’s anti-Semitism.

These frequent recontextualizations and the shifts in emotional allegiance that result yield great dramatic dividends. The scene that immediately follows Shylock’s dialogue with Tubal takes place at Belmont, where Bassanio correctly solves the riddle of the caskets. No sooner have he and Portia, Nerissa and Gratiano sworn “to solemnize / The bargain of [their] faith” than Salerio enters with news from Antonio “That steals the colour from Bassanio’s cheek” and suspends the action of the scene. One of the play’s principal narrative plots is, without warning, obtruding on the other, forestalling resolution and forcing Bassanio (and eventually Portia and Nerissa) to adopt quite different character functions. Only after the fable of the flesh bond has been concluded can we return to the Bassanio/Portia narrative–a salient reminder that Antonio, as well as Portia, requires Bassanio’s emotional and practical support.

The shifting layers of narrative that permeate the structure of The Merchant of Venice not only subvert traditional categories of genre, they also refuse to coalesce into a tidy unity. The play’s final act may provide closure to the two principal narratives–Bassanio and Portia are united, Antonio’s wealth is safe–but for several of the subordinate fables, there can be no such comic resolution. Shylock has lost his daughter, his riches, and his dignity; the ring trick has demonstrated how little Portia can trust the flighty Bassanio; the Christians of Venice have employed tactics that bear no trace of the “quality of mercy” to undermine the flesh bond; Antonio, the merchant whose overwhelming melancholy frames the play, remains an isolated figure, wealthy but quite alone.

These suspensions in the narrative substructure deflate the comic élan of the final scene and conclude the play with a dying fall. Nicholas Rowe’s careful anxiety is well placed; The Merchant of Venice, elusive to the last, is not a single, simple story with an easily digestible moral. To stage it as an ideological parable is to risk swamping its fine-tuned mechanism that so carefully refrains from the judgement of closure. After four hundred years in the spotlight, it’s time for Shylock to take a few measured paces upstage.

Gideon Lester is the American Repertory Theater’s Resident Dramaturg.