And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge!

We watched Merchant of Venice starring Al Pacino as Shylock last night and it was very good.  Not going to review it as a movie here.  Just have a few quick thoughts about Shakespeare's play that the movie inspired.

First off, this is the second production I've seen---the other was on stage---and both times I liked the story much better as a watched it unfold than I've ever enjoyed it while reading it.  The 12 year old watched with his parents and he stayed with it the whole way.  By the trial scene he was on the edge of his seat, terribly worried about how Antonio would get out of it, and he cheered when Portia saved the day.  I think both his reaction and mine are reminders that Shakespeare was first and foremost a playwright not a poet and, despite what Harold Bloom thinks, his plays are written to be performed not read.

Matt took the play up to bed with him, though.

Second, Merchant is no longer an anti-semitic play.  There's no getting around the fact that it was once, for almost four hundred years, even in 19th Century productions that made a point of bringing out Shylock's humanity, and it didn't stop being an anti-semitic play until recently, the last 50 years or so.

What has changed is that we do not automatically associate Jewishness with villainy of any sort, including usury---in fact, we are inclined to treat a character's Jewishness as a sign of special sympathy.  But also we don't automatically identify with "Christian" characters.  Just the opposite.  We're more inclined to see a character's flaunted Christianity as a sign of his untrustworthiness if not his out and out villainy.

Of course by we here I mean educated theater-going audiences in the United States.  There are plenty of audiences in the world, plenty here, whose views aren't much more progressive than those of the groundlings in Shakespeare's day and for whom the play will always be anti-semitic.

The fact that Antonio is such a devout Christian (and a practicing anti-semite) pushes us away from Antonio and towards Shylock.

But I've often thought that for the rest of us the only way we could experience the play with near the same visceral loathing of Shylock Shakespeare's audience felt would be to turn him into a Right Wing Christian Fundamentalist.  Which wouldn't be hard.   Jessica, Shylock's daughter, runs away because she feels her father's house a "hell."  There's a religious interpretation of the line but I don't think it plays.  The actress playing Jessica can't put it across.  And Shakespeare the playwright didn't give actors lines they couldn't sell.   The line is actually a counter to Shylock's refering to his "sober" home.  Which is his way of saying that he doesn't allow any fun in his house.  Shylock is one of Shakespeare's favorite stock characters, the domineering father who wants to lock his daughter up like a treasure he himself can't use but won't share.  A 21st Century Shylock would ban video games, pop music, most TV, boys, and anything else a teenage girl would naturally desire for fun but which her father would see as leading her along the path to sin---that is, sex.

Shylock is called a Jew but I think Shakespeare saw him as just another Puritan, like Angelo in Measure for Measure and Malvolio in Twelfth Night.

Third, Jeremy Irons played Antonio as gay, which is fine, and certainly charges Antonio's first line, "In truth I know not why I am so sad."  It's a useful way to play the part.  It's not necessary.  In the stage production I saw, at the Stratford Festival in Canada, the actor playing Antonio played him not as a repressed gay man but as a thwarted father.  He loves Bassanio as a surrogate son.  His problem is that he doesn't have a father's authority to say no to Bassanio.  All he can do is say yes, which puts him in a very awkward and weakened position.  Playing Antonio either as gay or as a would-be father keeps the essential dynamic between Antonio and Bassanio---Antonio loves the younger man far more than Bassanio deserves or can reciprocate.

No wonder Antonio is so sad.

But Irons plays him as gay and this gives him much to work with---for one thing, it allows him to give Antonio a lover's vanity---but it also gives the actress playing Portia a lot to play off of too.   Lynn Collins, who is very talented and very sexy but was clearly cast because she looks like she just stepped out of a painting by Botticelli, lets Portia see the truth about Antonio and Bassanio's love for each other and shows her to be alternately jealous, afraid that she'll lose Bassanio to Antonio, angry at Bassanio for tricking her into thinking he loves her, and mad and disappointed at herself for not having figured out the truth befoe she fell for Bassanio.

But Antonio's being a real sexual rival allows her to do some things that I expect few Portias get to do.  Collins could have Portia step down from her pedestal.  Portia as written is something of a plaster saint.  She is certainly the only wholly good and decent-hearted character in the play.  But having to win Bassanio's love away from Antonio and making sure that Antonio knows she's beaten him on that score, Collins' Portia gets to be emotionally maniupulative, not merely mischievous and playful, when she pulls the ring trick on Bassanio.  She also gets to be sexy.  Deliberately, naughtily, and yet angrily sexy.  The last we see of her she is walking off to the bedroom ahead of Bassanio, moving in such a way that she already seems to be shedding clothes, and looking back over her shoulder not just at Bassanio but at Antonio and everybody else left behind in the room to make sure they know what she is about to do, which is to fuck Bassanio's brains out.  She is going to make Bassanio hers in a way Antonio cannot make him his.

This isn't solely because she's a woman and Antonio's a man and Bassanio's essentially straight.

It is also because she is young and beautiful.

She makes sure Antonio is aware of this.  He is an old man, past love.  It's cruel on her part, but we're rooting for her and it's her last, best weapon.   Irons, left all alone, plays his defeat beautifully.  He accepts that he's lost, that it's right that he's lost, and that he is in fact too old.  He is connected with Shylock at the end, banished, cut off from the child he loves, and, looking backwards, we can see him like Shylock in another way in that his love for Bassanio was also imprisoning and, like Jessica,  Bassanio needed to be rescued.

Finally, Bassanio.  It's kind of a given in discussions of Shakespeare's comedies that on the whole his male lovers aren't worthy of his heroines.  This is certainly true of Bertram in All's Well That Ends Well.  He has no redeeming qualities and Helena seems a perfect idiot for doting on him, and the only way to sell the ending is to play it as if Bertram is as thoroughly changed as if he'd been replaced by another character.  He has to have a born again moment.  Which is ok for a fairy tale.  But I think Rosalind's Orlando, Viola's Orsino, and Portia's Bassanio all have been getting a bum rap.

It's true that none of them speak as well as the women they love.  Few characters in all of Shakespeare speak as well as Rosalind.  Hamlet's her only equal, and I wouldn't wish the Prince of Denmark on her, would you?  So the men come off as nearly invisible and definitely uninteresting on paper.  But Shakespeare didn't create them to exist on paper.  He created them to appear on a stage, and on stage they are played by tall, handsome, and likeable young actors who can show, without lines, the main virtue that makes them worthy of their more verbally dextrous mistresses---they can show their appreciation.

Seen, incarnated as, say, a Heath Ledger, Orlando does not have to prove himself worthy of Rosalind.  He is---besides tall, strong, and handsome---brave, good-hearted, honest, and determined to improve himself, to make himself worthy of her.

Bassanio, even if played by a Heath Ledger, and definitely as played by Joseph Finnes, has a trickier time of it.  But he is still undeniably worthy of Portia.  But this post has gone on too long.  I think I'll deal with him separately this afternoon or tonight.

Meanwhile, one quick note on the movie.  It left out my favorite bit of dialogue from the play, the exchange between Jessica and Lorenzo that's in the post below.

I think it is one of the most romantic bits of dialogue in all of Shakespeare.  But read Vadronor's comment and you'll see there's quite another way to play it.

Comments

[Kevin Wolf]

These are a few quick thoughts?

As it happens I only just saw Pacino's Looking for Richard, and though his style gets a little too flip in trying to "make Shakespeare accessible" it's still an excellent distillation of the play. I've seen very little on stage, but there's definitely some fine films out there...

[Amanda]

Sorry I came off as harsh, Lance. I didn't mean to come off as smacking you down so hard--I noodled off in my own direction. I did like this post, though.

[Lance]

A.,

Harsh schmarsh. You weren't harsh. And I didn't mean to come off as offended or defensive. I think your post is a perfectly reasonable rebuttal. The text of the play is anti-semitic.

But you can't put the text onstage. Back in the 19th Century, one of the great English actors of the day---I forget who it was---caused a controversy when he decided to play Shylock without the orange wig and big fake nose he'd always been portrayed with before. Probably actors playing Shylock used to lisp too. To get an idea of what stage Shylocks looked lie before that watch Alec Guiness as Fagin in Oliver Twist. It's horrifying!

But this means that even in the days when people were more reflexively and happily anti-semitic, audiences needed visual cues to hate Shylock. Once it became the standard to play him without those cues, when he was played as a man and not as a stage clown, Merchant was on its way to no longer being an anti-semitic.

By the way, have you ever read Marlowe's Jew of Malta? Now there is a great example of Elizabethan anti-semisitsm.

Kevin,

I've seen Looking for Richard. Made wish I could see Pacino play Richard III on stage. And Merchant made me want to see Looking all over again.

[KathyF]

I saw As You Like It the other day. Orlando was perfectly played by Dominic West, Rosalind by Helen McCrory, who I think was only off stage long enough to change costumes, and her cuz by Sienna Miller, who is just too cute for words. You are right, Shakes needs to be seen to be truly appreciated.

That Orlando is hot stuff, though. Agree with Rosalind there.

Have you read 1599? I am most anxious to read it.

[Lance]

Kathy,

I'm jealous. I've only seen one live production of As You Like It and it was a bit of a disappointment.

Their Rosalind was only OK and it didn't help that their Orlando was a head shorter than her.

How was Jacques in the production you saw? At Stratford, Ontario, where I saw it, their Jacques was good. It was the same actor we later saw as Antonio in Merchant. He seemed to be specializing in melancholy.

[Campaspe]

What a great discussion, here and on Pandagon. I always figured Shakespeare probably had the same ugly attitudes as others of his day--but he was a great writer, and a great writer knows one-dimensional stock figures aren't interesting. He was too good at his craft to just throw a conventional 16th-century Jewish villain onstage and take it from there. He had to give Shylock some humanity, or drama withers and dies ... hence "Hath not a Jew eyes?"