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 recreate 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-nourished-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 Merchants 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 Muthel'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 p
lay 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.
Two more productions followed before the founding of the modern RSC: Margaret Webster (the first female director of the play in Stratford) with a poorly received Emlyn Williams as Shylock; and Michael Langham's 1960 production starring Peter O'Toole. O'Toole's Shylock was singled out for praise: passionate rather than intellectual, he "shows us a human being of stature, driven to breaking point by the inhumanity of others,"13 while the Evening News saw him as "a dignified figure from the New rather than Old Testament--a Christ in torment."14 The Old Vic staged the play less successfully in the same season. While Barbara Leigh-Hunt's Portia was singled out for praise, Robert Speaight criticized the director's pandering to "the vogue for an eighteenth century Merchant."15 Speaight's remark is symptomatic of the increasing preference for productions that demonstrated the contemporary resonances of the play, as opposed to the historical recreations of the Victorian era.
2. Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 1953: a snarling and spitting Michael Redgrave as Shylock with a warm and dignified Peggy Ashcroft as Portia.
London's National Theatre mounted two critically acclaimed productions in the later twentieth century, directed by Jonathan Miller (1970) and Trevor Nunn (1999), both subsequently televised. The two were closely related, both featuring a dignified Shylock integrated into a capitalist mercantile culture: other than his yarmulke, his costume in both identified him as a member of the Venetian community. This allowed the idea of his "outsider" status to be explored more subtly: Miller noted that by "allowing Shylock to appear as one among many businessmen, scarcely distinguishable from them, it made sense of his claim that, apart from his customs, a Jew is like everyone else."16 Nunn followed this logic, as have many twenty-first-century directors of the play, such as Darko Tresnjak (Theater for a New Audience, 2007) and Tim Carroll (RSC, 2008).
Miller's production starred Laurence Olivier, whose key inspiration for his performance was Benjamin Disraeli. He dramatized the trials of an alien attempting to integrate himself into a new society, his abuses at Christian hands eventually unleashing a dignified and righteous rage. Henry Goodman's Shylock in Nunn's production was in a similar position, and emphasized the genial and fatherly aspects of the character: this was a good-natured and often humorous Shylock, whose trials were undeserved. For both Miller and Nunn, the key to demonstrating the insidiousness of racial prejudice was in setting the production in history recent enough to be uncomfortably familiar, but distant enough to provide a semblance of objectivity. Miller hearkened back to the late nineteenth century, while Nunn set his production in the 1930s. Both, too, used the character of Jessica to unsettle the harmony of Act 5. Miller made her "melancholy, not at all the giddy, venturesome girl one might expect,"17 and at the end she could be heard singing the Kaddish offstage as a lament to her lost father. Gabrielle Jourdan's Jessica in the 1999 production was similarly discontented and closed the play by singing the same Yiddish prayer in a direct reference. Where the eighteenth-century star vehicles had relied on a tremendous Act 4 exit from Shylock to cast a pallor over the remaining scenes, Miller and Nunn's use of Jessica established a quieter and more universal epitaph for cultures violently subsumed.
A more recent trend in performance is to use the play as an exploration of male sexuality, often with the result of refocusing a production on the Merchant. Academics may argue that early modern platonic homosocial modes of behavior are easily confused with more modern understandings of homosexuality, but onstage it has become increasingly customary to explain Antonio's melancholy through feelings of unrequited (or once-requited) love for Bassanio, often with the suggestion that his sexuality makes him as much of an outsider as Shylock's religion does his. Bill Alexander's 1987 RSC production (discussed below) extended the homosexual theme to include most of the Venetian characters, and Michael Dobson notes that in Nunn's 1999 production David Bamber's Antonio's melancholy was occasioned by his "forlorn sexual yearnings for Bassanio [that] had long since been repressed."18 Edward Hall's 2008 production with his all-male company Propeller relocated the play to the fictional Venice Prison, an exclusively male environment where the "female" characters were drag queens. Hall's production utilized Shakespeare's text to explore various incarnations of male-male relationships, from the negotiation of power and control to the simply romantic.
Despite Charles Edelman's assertion in 2002 that "given the sensitivity of the play's subject matter, it is very unlikely that [a major feature film] will ever be made,"19 a full-scale film emerged only three years later, directed by Michael Radford and featuring an all-star cast including Al Pacino (Shylock), Jeremy Irons (Antonio), and Joseph Fiennes (Bassanio). Where the larger-scale Victorian stage productions had attempted to recreate the splendor of Venice onstage, Radford filmed on location in Venice itself, using dark alleys, open promenades, and claustrophobic courtrooms to impressive effect. Setting the production in the Venice of Shakespeare's time, Radford recreated the historical realities of Jewish life in the city, with Jews forced to wear red caps and live in ghettos. On television, as well as the screened versions of Miller and Nunn's National productions, the 1980 version for the BBC Shakespeare series directed by Jack Gold offered a very human, but not entirely sympathetic, Shylock in the Jewish actor Warren Mitchell, and drew attention for the uninhibited sexuality of Lorenzo and Jessica.
AT THE RSC
If ever there was a time when we should be asking the questions about humanity, greed, the outsider's place in society that are in this play it is now, in a time of decay.20
Race, Bigotry, and Alienation
The wrong question--"is it anti-Semitic?"--is always asked of The Merchant of Venice. The answer is: "only as far as is strictly necessary." Ask another question--"is it offensive?"--and the answer is an unequivocal "yes."21
Whatever their race or religion, Jewish or Christian, Muslim or Hindu, a member of the audience watching The Merchant of Venice in modern times is going to feel slightly uncomfortable in their seat. There is no doubt that Shakespeare's Jew is based on a stereotype, a vicious caricature of a little understood and much maligned race. How does a post-Second World War director tackle a play that links villainy with religion without being accused of racism? The answer, more often than not, has been to make the Christian characters equally, if not more, horrible than the Jew who decides their fate. Is this an imposition of modern times? Does it distort the nature of Shakespeare's original intention? The questions surrounding these issues have made The Merchant of Venice the real "problem play" of our times.
The playwright Arnold Wesker was compelled to give his opinion after going to see the RSC's 1993 production directed by David Thacker, which proved one too many Merchants for him:
The strongest evidence offered in support of the view that Shakespeare did not create a stereotype are those widely trumpeted lines which he gives to Shylock as special pleading for his humanity: "Hath not a Jew eyes? ..." For [John] Gross, as for many others, it is a noble piece of writing. Not for me! Far from vindicating the play, the sentiments betray it--self-pitying, patronising, and deeply offensive. Implied within them is medieval Christian arrogance, which assumed the right to confer or withdraw humanity as it saw fit.22
However, Shylock's statement of common "humanity" is delivered with the ex
press purpose of pleading his right to revenge, by very inhumane means. Taken out of context both this speech and Portia's speech on mercy are wonderful statements of humanity; taken in the context of the play, however, they both echo with hypocrisy.
Shylock, unlike the Christian characters in the play, stands as an embodiment of his race. Common Elizabethan myths about Jews, which interestingly included the use of human sacrifice, of Christian blood, in their rituals,* have directly influenced Shakespeare's characterization. The true offensiveness of this negative stereotype is evidenced when real Jewish beliefs are taken into consideration:
Jewish law includes within it a blueprint for a just and ethical society, where no one takes from another or harms another or takes advantage of another, but everyone gives to one another and helps one another and protects one another ... We are commanded not to leave a condition that may cause harm, to construct our homes in ways that will prevent people from being harmed, and to help a person whose life is in danger. These commandments regarding the preservation of life are so important in Judaism that they override all of the ritual observances that people think are the most important part of Judaism.23
The difficulty for any actor playing Shylock today therefore resides in the portrayal of the character's Jewishness:
A photograph in The Observer shows that Eric Porter's Shylock [1965] was given bags under the eyes and a long hooked nose, while Emrys James [1971] depended for his repulsiveness less upon make-up than saliva. Described by one critic as "... barefoot, robed in old curtains, with a mouthful of spittle ...," James was "a medieval Jewish stereotype in a large, baggy kaftan, with grey ringlets spilling from beneath his skull cap." The same reviewer went on:
This is a Jew straight out of the Penny Dreadful magazines, literally salivating at the thought of his pound of Christian flesh.24