Production sacrifices depth

GRAHAM FORST

You can think of this summer’s Bard on the Beach production of The Merchant of Venice, directed by Rachel Ditor, as a post-post-Holocaust Merchant. That is, all the various strategies used by modern directors to make Merchant acceptable to postwar audiences have been dispensed with here, and the result is an acid-tipped production, with a very dark Shylock.

Some of the strategies that have been used to make the character of Shylock more sympathetic involve cutting lines, re-arranging scenes or even adding scenes – as, for example, was done in the recent Al Pacino Merchant, in which interpolated domestic Yiddish language scenes were added clearly to raise viewers’ empathy for the single-father Shylock. But there’s already plenty of material within Shakespeare’s play to create sympathy for the Jewish moneylender. All one has to do is look at how Shakespeare altered his sources for Merchant to see how important to him it was to meliorate the prevailing Jewish stereotypes: in the Bard’s two main sources (Marlowe’s Jew of Malta and Giovanni’s Il Pecarone), the Jews are vicious, vengeful, two-dimensional melodramatic villains. Having none of this, Shakespeare invents a “past” between Shylock and Antonio, the Merchant of Venice, who would habitually insult Shylock in public by spitting into his beard. As well, Shakespeare adds a subplot in which Shylock’s daughter Jessica elopes with a Christian, breaking Shylock’s heart and motivating his Act 3 intention to take the “merry” bond of the pound of flesh literally. Shakespeare also incorporates the famous heart-rending “Hath not a Jew eyes” speech, which never fails to create audience sympathy for, or even empathy with, the Jew.

Most importantly, Shakespeare nestles the Shylock/Antonio pound-of-flesh plot within a contrapuntal fairy story of a princess whose various suitors have to learn to see beneath appearances to win the princess’ hand: her suitors are given three caskets to choose between – gold, silver and lead – only the one who picks the lead casket will marry the princess. The rationale for this paralleling of two quite different stories is to emphasize the real theme of Merchant, as the famous line from the play states, “All that glitters is not gold.” In other words, we have to learn to look under the surface of things to see the reality beneath, and this applies no less to the three caskets than it does to the superficial stereotype of the Jew, passed down to Shakespeare through the Gospels, through legend and through the genocidal ravings of Martin Luther.

But Ditor is on a different tack. Take, for example, the excruciating scene in Act 4, where Shylock is given leave by the Venetian court to exact his pound of flesh, a scene that can be done any number of ways. In the recent and brilliant Trevor Nunn TV production, to choose one, Shylock (Henry Goodman) is visibly torn apart by what he is about to do, shaking and wincing. And, in a production I saw recently in Stratford, England, Shylock is clearly relieved when Portia (in disguise as a lawyer) tells him, just before he cuts Antonio, to “tarry.” In Ditor’s production, Shylock can’t wait to get at Antonio, even spending gruesome time circling around the bound merchant, sizing up the precise piece of flesh he wants to cut.

Of course, these are directorial decisions, and there’s plenty of flexibility in Shakespeare to allow for them. But Ditor’s decisions don’t just bend Shakespeare, they twist him and re-shape him. (In a recent interview at Bard on the Beach, she said that the play needed “molding,” which some might see as a bit of chutzpah.) For example, she slices right out of the play whole scenes and speeches designed to elicit sympathy for Shylock, such as the scene in which the blind father of the play’s clown is humiliated, foreshadowing the later humiliation of Shylock and heightening its pathos. She also cuts out many of the lines in Act 5, which dimensionalize Shylock’s daughter, Jessica, again adding pathos to Shylock’s loss. Many modern productions – the Pacino and Nunn productions are examples – take this dimensionalizing of Jessica a step farther, interpolating scenes in which Jessica, when she learns that the Venetian court has awarded her and her fiancé a large inheritance from Shylock, finds herself alone on stage, singing a song in Hebrew or, in the Laurence Olivier version, chanting the Kaddish.

There is, however, somewhat of a payoff for Ditor’s decisions. With the evil Shylock exorcized from the play at the end of Act 4, Act 5, when all the Christians (except Antonio) get married and have a jovial feast, is much brighter than it is in other productions, in which a sense of tragedy hangs in the air from Shylock’s courtroom mortification. One thinks here of the Olivier production, in which he staggers offstage after being forced to convert to Christianity, and howls like a dying wolf while all the characters freeze in place. In Ditor’s version, however, the beaten Shylock passively receives the sign of the cross, twice, from Antonio, suggesting his forced conversion is, in fact, a blessing.

Ditor ends her production with Antonio, alone on stage, a single light heightening his sorrow in being deserted by Portia’s lover Bassanio, for whom he has clear homoerotic feelings. This is a sure touch. But with Shylock having been so cruelly and summarily treated in Act 4, the parallels with the alienated Jew are lost on the audience, and the play’s deeper dimensions are sacrificed.

Ditor’s laudable intention here was clearly to force her non-Jewish audience to face the facts about their latent antisemitism, but the price is high. As my own dear mum, married to a Jew and given to her own brand of Jewish homiletic wisdom, used to say, “You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar,” and Shakespeare’s Shylock, if presented honestly and thoughtfully, would do more to remind people that, yes, Jews, if pricked, will bleed, than will the bitter, vengeful stereotype presented in this summer’s Bard Merchant.

Graham Forst, PhD, taught literature and philosophy at Capilano University until his retirement and now teaches at Simon Fraser University and the University of British Columbia. From 1975 to 2010, he co-chaired the symposium committee of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre.

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