Antoni Cimolini’s production of The Merchant of Venice at Stratford (2013, Ontario) this summer was a masterpiece of tact and sensitivity. The ambivalence of the Jewish moneylender Shylock has made the play challenging to produce in modern times. As Harry Golden observed, the play has the distinction of having been banned both in Nazi Germany and in Israel for, respectively, its sympathetic and its venomous depiction of the Jew. Staging the play today — when there is a resurgence of anti-Semitism throughout the world, including North American college campuses — is especially risky.
In his program notes Cimolino noted the historic background to the play’s “usurer.” Christians like Antonio — who is the titular merchant of Venice — needs to borrow the financial resources he risks in order to rise, or here even to survive, in his society — or in this case, to help his wastrel friend Bassanio woo and wed the spectacularly wealthy Belmont heiress Portia. As Christianity forbade Christians to charge interest on loans the ambitious merchants had to turn to non-Christians to fund their gambles. That made the Jews, already banned from the respectable professions, the money-lenders, whom the Christians needed — and hated all the more because they needed them.
Cimolino sets the play in 1930s Venice, which historically reflected Shylock’s situation. Jews had been accepted in Italian society and allowed their well-earned prominence in the arts, culture and even government, until Mussolini and his National Fascist in 1938 introduced the race laws that inter alia betrayed the Jews’ earlier acceptance and security. As a result we watch Shylock’s drama knowing the conflagration that will for European Jewry ensue.
The production takes several subtle steps to address the charge that the play is anti-Semitic. For one thing, it distinguishes Shylock from personifying The Jew. He is A Jew here. The first Jewish character we see is Tubal (Robert King), in full Hassidic garb, as he tries to play with Venetian children until the antagonistic adults, particularly a priest, “save” them and chase him off. When Shylock (Scott Wentworth) first appears he is in a business suit, set apart only by his small black yarmulke. Tubal reads “Jew,” Shylock “Jewish businessman.” When Shylock later insists on his contracted pound of Antonio’s (Tom McCamus) flesh, Tubal silently walks away, dissociating himself — and thus Judaism — from Shylock’s bloody vengeance.
The children with whom Tubal played return to harass Shylock, apparently having learned their hateful prejudice from their parents. It is to those children that Shylock here delivers the famous “When you prick us, do we not bleed?” speech. Here he is not just defending the humanity of his people but trying to counteract the prejudice these children have been taught. This touch heightens the other moments in the play where children betray their parents: the servant Gobbo’s (Ron Pederson) cruel abuse of his blind father, Jessica’s (Sara Farb) increasingly destructive betrayal of Shylock, and even Portia’s (Michelle Giroux) attempt by a commissioned song to direct the suitor she desires to pick the right casket, in the rite her father ordained to protect her. The song’s rhymes —
The children with whom Tubal played return to harass Shylock, apparently having learned their hateful prejudice from their parents. It is to those children that Shylock here delivers the famous “When you prick us, do we not bleed?” speech. Here he is not just defending the humanity of his people but trying to counteract the prejudice these children have been taught. This touch heightens the other moments in the play where children betray their parents: the servant Gobbo’s (Ron Pederson) cruel abuse of his blind father, Jessica’s (Sara Farb) increasingly destructive betrayal of Shylock, and even Portia’s (Michelle Giroux) attempt by a commissioned song to direct the suitor she desires to pick the right casket, in the rite her father ordained to protect her. The song’s rhymes —
Tell me where is Fancy bred,
Or in the heart, or in the head?
How begot or nourish-ed?
— subtlely directs Bassanio (Tyrrell Crews) to the casket of -- lead.
So Portia, who in her judicial pretence will insist upon the letter of the contract, here by deployment of language subverts her father’s command to serve her will. She and her maid will later trick their suitors into violating their oaths to them, proving yet again that the ostensibly superior Christians cannot be trusted to keep their word, while Shylock, of the people of The Book, maintains the integrity of his contracts, his word. That Portia makes the petard on which he is hoist. Perhaps the drama spins out of its opening lines of ennui — Antonio’s “In sooth I know not why I am so sad, It wearies me, you say it wearies you” — because the play’s Christian society, devoted to investments, business risks, and romantic deceptions and stratagems, seems airily empty in contrast to the passions of Shylock.
The aggregate effect is to place Shylock and Tubal in a world teeming with anti-Semitism. In the play Antonio admits to having spat on Shylock and promises to do so again after Shylock has served him with his loan. With the hatred so blatant early we are prepared for the extremity of Shylock's punishment at the end -- and we can sense some reason for his rigid adherence to his contract earlier.
Cimolino also grants Portia a moment of saving grace. The text leaves her an uncertainly virtuous figure. She wields a legal authority beyond what she can properly claim. While her speech on the unstrained quality of mercy may seem virtuous, to Shylock she delivers rather a lumpy justice that renders that speech hypocritical. She goes beyond seizing his property and rewarding his treacherous daughter to stealing his soul with the requirement he convert to Christianity. Where Shakespeare gives Portia no moments of redeeming conscience, Cimolino gives her two. After the “trial” dismisses Shylock a line of Mussolini’s brownshirts file past judge Portia, heartily saluting “him” for his treatment of the Jew. That gives her a moment of second thought. She stands alone, wondering at the implications of her judgment. We who remember history know. At play’s end, when Jessica leaves to enjoy her new marriage into the prized Christian community, along with Shylock’s wealth that she has been given, Portia gives her something else: the red yarmulke Shylock wore to the trial that he dropped in his beaten departure. If it then signified his bloody-minded insistence on the word of his contract, it now augurs the blood of the Holocaust. Portia’s last gesture casts a shadow across this ostensible comedy’s ostensibly happy ending.
So Portia, who in her judicial pretence will insist upon the letter of the contract, here by deployment of language subverts her father’s command to serve her will. She and her maid will later trick their suitors into violating their oaths to them, proving yet again that the ostensibly superior Christians cannot be trusted to keep their word, while Shylock, of the people of The Book, maintains the integrity of his contracts, his word. That Portia makes the petard on which he is hoist. Perhaps the drama spins out of its opening lines of ennui — Antonio’s “In sooth I know not why I am so sad, It wearies me, you say it wearies you” — because the play’s Christian society, devoted to investments, business risks, and romantic deceptions and stratagems, seems airily empty in contrast to the passions of Shylock.
The aggregate effect is to place Shylock and Tubal in a world teeming with anti-Semitism. In the play Antonio admits to having spat on Shylock and promises to do so again after Shylock has served him with his loan. With the hatred so blatant early we are prepared for the extremity of Shylock's punishment at the end -- and we can sense some reason for his rigid adherence to his contract earlier.
Cimolino also grants Portia a moment of saving grace. The text leaves her an uncertainly virtuous figure. She wields a legal authority beyond what she can properly claim. While her speech on the unstrained quality of mercy may seem virtuous, to Shylock she delivers rather a lumpy justice that renders that speech hypocritical. She goes beyond seizing his property and rewarding his treacherous daughter to stealing his soul with the requirement he convert to Christianity. Where Shakespeare gives Portia no moments of redeeming conscience, Cimolino gives her two. After the “trial” dismisses Shylock a line of Mussolini’s brownshirts file past judge Portia, heartily saluting “him” for his treatment of the Jew. That gives her a moment of second thought. She stands alone, wondering at the implications of her judgment. We who remember history know. At play’s end, when Jessica leaves to enjoy her new marriage into the prized Christian community, along with Shylock’s wealth that she has been given, Portia gives her something else: the red yarmulke Shylock wore to the trial that he dropped in his beaten departure. If it then signified his bloody-minded insistence on the word of his contract, it now augurs the blood of the Holocaust. Portia’s last gesture casts a shadow across this ostensible comedy’s ostensibly happy ending.
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