The Globe Merchant of Venice

Jonathan Munby’s Globe production, as telecast to the cinemas, takes Shylock’s side, preferring to emphasize the emotional force of the tragically wronged Jew over the satire of the trivial Italian merchant class. Several touches direct us toward that point.

The production amplifies Jessica’s significance. In contrast to the frivolity of her eloping with Lorenzo and the stories of her wastrel spending, she has several scenes of powerful pathos. The production stresses the costs of her betrayal of Shylock, the losses suffered in deracination. When she first meets Portia Lorenzo has to coax her in what nicety to speak. Out of Shylock’s world she is out of her element. She shows this again when Lorenzo tries to dance with her, then sweeps Portia off instead, leaving Jessica a self-conscious outsider, watching. To the latter end the production has Jessica and Shylock speaking yiddish in one scene, which sets them apart from the English dialogue — and most of the audience — as also does the added mix of Latin liturgy and Italian songs. 

The production dramatically undercuts the joy and romance of the last scene, which reunites the loving couples. While Antonio reads of the success of his merchant ventures and Bassanio reads about his Portia’s legal foray, Jessica in the left foreground reads of Shylock’s forced conversion. She falls to the floor wailing Oveenu Malkeinu, a hymn to God the Father. The resurgence of her Jewish roots reminds her of her loss and bars her sharing of the Christians’ trivial joy. Instead of the comedy of merchant Antonio we have the tragedy of the Jew Shylock.

The production then shows Shylock converting, the baptismal waters searing his bare head and face like acid.  In the last image the heavy doors of Portia’s mansion slam shut on Jessica, in contrast to her earlier escape from what she felt was her prison in Shylock’s house. The Christians’ ostensible triumph is through Jessica played as a tragedy, Shylock the wronged victim, his Jessica seduced to his ruin by the Venetian gloss.

The play’s separate plot lines are united by the contrast between the Christians’ playing fast, loose and florid with their words and the Jew’s insistence upon fidelity to the word, the Law. The Jews are the people of the Book — which in an early scene Antonio profanes. In contrast, the Christians are shallow creatures of play and betrayals. Antonio's generosity to his beloved friend Bassanio is undermined when Bassanio spurns his doomed mentor's kiss; the friends have a romantic tension. Antonio tries to buy his lover as Bassanio and Lorenzo both court and wed to solve their financial problems.
      Even after the nearly mortal consequence of Antonio’s idle oath, the Christians continue to make promises only to break them. Hence the business with the wives’ rings and their husbands’ betrayals, albeit to their male personae. "By this hand" becomes sinister after Shylock's resolve to claim his sworn "pound of flesh."

The emptiness of their language is also the point of the familiar servant wit of Launcelot Gobbo but also of the scenes of Gratiano’s compulsive verbal virtuosity. Portia’s famous speech about mercy is reduced to that level of shimmering rhetoric -- she will fail her own test of mercy as sorely as Shylock did -- as are her and Bassiano’s rhyming duel over “the ring” and her later lyrical “On such a night.” These are flashy interludes of language without substance or moral compass. 

In contrast stands the nobility of Shylock’s rigid faith in his word, an honour long since lost in the passage from the Biblical desert to corrupt and commercial Venice. As in Othello, Venice stands for modern civilization in all its gloss and moral vacuity, which resents and dooms the noble primitive that has strayed in.

That theme connects the three-casket marriage bond on Portia with the Shylock story. Portia is sworn to obey her father’s commands in marriage, but here she subtly compromises her required disengagement in order to help the handsome but vacuous Bassanio. When he comes in, the song in the background sets up the rhyme that would lead him to the lead casket. She interrupts his movement towards the gold.
     At this point there’s a brilliant touch in the costume design. The three caskets warn us off the allure of a shiny, costly surface, the gold and silver. The winning choice is humble lead. In this scene Portia wears gold and Bassanio silver, emblems of those characters’ — and indeed their whole gentile society’s — false allure and ersatz value. The opening scene, the elopers’ masque, and the later dance scene define the Christians in terms of play, complacent cruelty and triviality, in contrast to the Jew’s dignified difference and the relentless abuse that drives him to revenge and -- by their hatred -- the ultimate loss of his soul.