The Merchant of Venice

by William Shakespeare

  When I’m directing any play by Shakespeare I try to approach it as if William Shakespeare was in the rehearsal room with us. If I was working with a living playwright I would be in constant dialogue about the meaning of the play and what the playwright was trying to achieve, and how we might express that most effectively. With Shakespeare, self-evidently, you can’t speak to him or conjure him up, so all you can do is proceed honestly and with integrity in relation to that play. I believe that if Shakespeare were alive now he would not give permission for the play to be performed uncut—I’m certain that he would rewrite it. It’s the only Shakespeare play I’ve ever directed where I said at the beginning of the rehearsal period, “I’m going to make some cuts.” The context has changed so drastically that I think that the play needs delicate attention. I think that does affect the meaning of the play, and so I was very clear in my own mind that this was a conscious decision I would take. These weren’t massive changes and to a lot of people might have been totally imperceptible. It was partly, for example, a number of judicious prunings of the word “Jew,” particularly when uttered by Portia. Although it’s fashionable to turn Portia into a kind of rich bitch, she is clearly the life force at the heart of the play. She is the person who argues passionately for redemption, for the classic Shakespearean themes—particularly as his achievement grew to full maturity in the Late Plays—of mercy, redemption, forgiveness. But in that scene I don’t know how many times we cut the word “Jew.” It becomes like a hammer banging on a nail, “Jew,” “Jew,” “Jew,” “Jew,” all with a slight pejorative edge to it. It inevitably affects what one’s sensitivities are in relation to the character, so there was a slight pruning there.

  People might think we were oversensitive to the use of “Jew,” but if you look at the rest of Shakespeare’s canon, leaving The Merchant of Venice out, there are only six other uses of the word “Jew,” and every one is pejorative. Launce’s wonderful comic speech in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, telling the audience about his dog, says “A Jew would have wept!”—but not the dog. Even a Jew would have wept, therefore this dog is even worse than a Jew—that is the joke. This is the stuff of normal comedy within Shakespeare—you can’t hide from the fact that the rest of his work regards the word “Jew” and therefore being Jewish in a negative light. Having said that, it indicates what a fantastic achievement The Merchant of Venice is, because Shakespeare makes Shylock, in so many senses, so sympathetic. “Hath not a Jew eyes?” It’s almost like Shakespeare, because of his own humanity, is digging as deep as he could possibly dig to show us a Jewish person in a sympathetic light, but even within that context he couldn’t quite rid himself of his own culture and the limitations of his own society, his personal history, all the rest of it. Therefore I would say the proper responsibility of an artist in relation to that is to make a personal decision that says “I really don’t believe that Shakespeare would want this.” You might think that is a terribly arrogant thing to say, but any choice you make about any Shakespeare production is an assumption about what you believe he would have wanted. Nothing is neutral, you make crucial interpretive decisions all the way along, so it’s essentially only a decision of that kind to say, “I just don’t think Shakespeare would want this.”

  I found it an utterly delightful experience doing the play and I was proud of it and proud of the work that everybody did. I was blessed with an exceptional cast, in particular to have David Calder playing Shylock, because what David brings to the table is not just his skill as an actor but his intelligence, something Penny Downie [who played Portia] shares as well. They helped me enormously in the developing conception of the show. It was the collective endeavor, I think, of that group of actors, that turned it into something that I think we all thoroughly believed in, and believed was very special.

  5. “[I]t became even clearer why Shylock, a devout, sensitive, and serious man, would have such difficulty with drunken lager-louts and Christians”—David Thacker production, 1993.

  TRESNJAK: It had enormous implications, especially in New York, where our production originated and where staging the play is still far more controversial than staging it in England. From the earliest planning phases to the opening night we worked extensively with James Shapiro, the author of Shakespeare and the Jews. His insights were invaluable—not just about the text but about the entire production history of the play. In many discussions, the word that we kept coming back to was exclusion. How are the characters in The Merchant of Venice marginalized or excluded—because of their religion, gender, age, race, sexuality, or economic status? In a workshop that took place six months before the actual production, I got to play around with the ways in which the text could support various forms of exclusion, and I found that this approach nourished both the tragic and the comic aspects of the play. (Granted, much of the humor was rather cruel.) Most of all, it helped me see Shylock as a part of the universe that Shakespeare creates in The Merchant of Venice. And, directing the play in 2007, that seemed to me like a worthwhile goal, to reincorporate Shylock into the general fabric of the play.

  How did you and your designer represent the contrasting settings of Venice and Belmont?

  THACKER: I had the inspiration to do Merchant on Black Wednesday, because, like the events of that day, things happen in the play so rapidly. That’s when the idea of setting it in a modern London came. We modeled the world of Venice on the Lloyd’s building, so it was the world of the stock exchange, big business, suits, money, computers, mobile phones, all that sort of stuff. The challenge with all of Shakespeare is to invent a world that you believe is the world of the play. With Belmont, which is always tricky, what we most wanted the audience to focus on was the caskets. So if there was a criticism of the production in retrospect, I’d say I think Venice was, in design terms, very powerful and persuasive, and Belmont might not have resonated so powerfully.

  TRESNJAK: According to the critic Marjorie Garber, The Merchant of Venice presents us with “the opposites that are increasingly similar” during the course of the play. One of those seeming opposites is Venice versus Belmont. Both worlds are ultimately ruled by financial considerations. So for me, the most important practical concern was to move swiftly from one setting to the other, because I did not want the textual similarities and the thematic connections to get obliterated by long and elaborate scenic changes.

  The constant in John Lee Beatty’s set design for the play were three sleek desks with three Apple PowerBooks on top of them. Above each desk was a flatscreen monitor. In Venice, we projected stock market quotes on the monitors. I was inspired by the Internet cafés of New York City and by the trading floor down on Wall Street. The characters would tune out of conversations to check their e-mail or to answer their cell phones. (Today, technology is another way that we exclude and marginalize each other on a moment-to-moment basis.) The bulk of our fourteen-member cast was featured in these scenes. The characters smashed into each other throughout. I wanted to create a rude and congested urban setting. In Belmont, the three PowerBooks represented the three caskets and we projected Shakespeare’s riddles on the monitors above them. Working on an off-Broadway budget, I had to turn our own financial considerations into a dramatic statement. So Portia’s entire household staff consisted of Nerissa and Balthasar, who we thought of as Portia’s IT guy. I imagined Belmont as a hi-tech haven that Portia’s father had left her, isolated, under-populated, and eerie.

  6. F. Murray Abraham as Shylock and Tom Nelis as Antonio in Darko Tresnjak’s 2007 production, set in a modern financial center, with flatscreen monitors and Apple PowerBooks.

  Bassanio sometimes seems like a gold-digger rather than a romantic lead. Are there any social relations in this play that aren’t dependent on money?

  THACKER: I think he is a gold-digger, but I also think he falls in love! I don’t think that if he wasn’t massively attracted to Portia to begin with he’d ask Antonio to lend him the money. I think he can’t believe his luck really. There’s nothin
g that I remember from directing the play that implies he doesn’t love her. I think Bassanio is a really tough part because he has some very difficult speeches to handle, like the speech when he chooses the lead casket. Technically that’s a very difficult speech to get the hang of. But I felt that he became more and more attractive and charismatic as the play develops. I think we grow to like Bassanio very much by the end, and I think because Portia loves him we forgive him a lot. I don’t think he’s one of Shakespeare’s greatest creations: if you asked me to list all the male hero leads in order of preference, he’d be way down the list somewhere. He can’t compare with Romeo, Hamlet, and God knows how many other young men that Shakespeare created, but I think he works in this play.

  TRESNJAK: Our production ended with the three couples swaying to the Rosemary Clooney recording of “How Am I to Know?” The lyrics of the Dorothy Parker/Jack King song struck me as rather appropriate:

  Oh

  How am I to know

  If it’s really love

  That found its way here?

  Oh

  How am I to know

  Will it linger on

  And leave me then?

  I’ll dare not guess

  At this strange happiness

  But oh

  How am I to know

  Can it be that love

  Has come to stay here?

  So I think that not being able to answer your question is, for me, the whole point of the play. The characters themselves are not in the position to answer it. Along the way, they all make compromising choices, choices that haunt even the most innocent relationships. I am thinking especially of Lorenzo and Jessica. They always struck me as the youngest, the most innocent characters in the play. We certainly cast the roles in our production that way. The decision to steal Shylock’s possessions haunts them, and I think that the unease that it creates between them is right under the surface of the famous “In such a night as this” exchange at the top of the last scene.

  As for Bassanio, he reminds me of Chance Wayne, the male lead in Tennessee Williams’ Sweet Bird of Youth—a tarnished angel, still appealing yet also somewhat pathetic. Frayed. I think that the last train is about to leave the station and he needs to catch it however he can. The moment in the first scene when Bassanio is about to ask Antonio for money—when he talks about his school days and uses the analogy of the lost arrow—it always made me squirm in the best possible way. It’s wonderfully icky—an innocent, youthful appeal by someone who’s neither innocent nor all that youthful.

  The play is called The Merchant of Venice, and yet Antonio has a smaller part than Portia, Shylock, Bassanio, and even by some counts Gratiano and Lorenzo! Why is that, and does it present peculiar problems for casting (and for the actor playing the merchant)?

  THACKER: We had a much older actor playing Antonio and it was very clear that this was in that tradition of gay men who love young men, but would never dream of being sexual with them, or indeed of imposing upon the young man anything that would be discomforting. There’s a pattern that as a heterosexual man I’ve been quite familiar with in my life, of older gay men having wonderfully respectful relationships with young heterosexual men, whom they perhaps do desire but would never risk allowing anything sexual to spoil that relationship. That’s how I imagined Antonio’s relationship with the younger men. I think he’s very sad that he doesn’t have his own partner; probably he can’t confess his own homosexuality anyway in the society in which he lives. But he also has his own serious failings, like the nature of his aggression toward Shylock at the beginning and his overt anti-Semitism, which I think was clear enough just by playing it straight down the line. There didn’t strike me as being any problem about the casting of him or carrying through the logic of the relationships.

  TRESNJAK: I don’t think that the size of the role is problematic since any actor playing Antonio has to deal with the mystery of his sadness, the nature of his relationship with Bassanio, and the source of his hatred for Shylock. At this stage in my career, I am increasingly intrigued by Shakespeare’s shorthand, by those moments where something seems to be withheld from the audience. Antonio’s reticence—what it implies about his position in the Venetian society, his relationship with Bassanio, and his hatred for Shylock—is rather intriguing.

  In casting the roles of Antonio and Bassanio, I decided that I had to be completely honest about the fact that we were going to explore the sexual ambiguity of their relationship. Acknowledging that dimension of The Merchant of Venice is an essential part of how I see the play, just as much a part of it as Shylock’s Jewishness.

  The “choice of casket” motif is like something out of a fairy tale, but Portia is a flesh-and-blood woman, no fairy-tale princess: is that tough to reconcile stylistically?

  THACKER: In the context of a modern dress production set in the city of London, Portia has got to be an intelligent modern woman. She is clearly the most intelligent person in the play anyway: she thinks on her feet, she’s quick-witted, she’s intelligent, but most important, she is the moral center of the play. It is through Portia that we understand how to consider everybody else’s behavior and actions. She’s yet another of those wonderful Shakespearean women who are warm, kind, passionate, sexy, intelligent, and have such integrity that it is through them that we understand how human beings should behave. I’m very positive about Portia. I think she’s meant to be a young woman, imprisoned by an obsessive father who has tried to trap her in a way that, certainly in lots of cultures, is very easy for us to understand now. So, no, I didn’t find it difficult to reconcile, I found it a pretty straightforward choice.

  TRESNJAK: I believe that, regardless of how one chooses to stage The Merchant of Venice, Portia herself has a choice from the very beginning of the play. To stay in Belmont, accept her father’s will, keep her fortune, and potentially end up with a jackass of a husband. Or to leave Belmont, get disinherited, and discover her own path in the world at large. (That, too, is a common fairy-tale motif.) So, in my opinion, for all her moping in the first scene, Portia is a compromised, complicated character from the outset, and not exactly a fairy-tale princess. In our production, I tried to highlight this by making it clear that Nerissa was a working girl, mostly supportive but at times bewildered and infuriated by Portia—especially after her racist remark about the Prince of Morocco.

  It’s sometimes said that whereas Barabas in Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta is the stereotypical villainous Jew, Shylock is humanized, for example by “Hath not a Jew eyes?” and the reference to Leah’s ring which he would not have given away for “a wilderness of monkeys.” But you can’t get much more stereotypically villainous than threatening to cut off a pound of someone’s flesh. How did you and your Shylock reconcile this?

  THACKER: I think it’s very clear that for a large part of the play Shakespeare is reasonably hostile in his attitude to Shylock: “I hate him for he is a Christian” (Act 1 Scene 3). If someone said in a play, “I hate him because he is a Muslim,” for example, you’d think that was a pretty unpleasant line for anyone to utter. Also, “If I can catch him once upon the hip.” These things are unquestionably there in the play, so either you let them flourish or you slightly adjust them. I was enormously influenced when I directed the play by the fact that at the time I’d just directed the British premiere of Arthur Miller’s play Broken Glass. Broken Glass is essentially about a Jewish person who’s subjected to a degree of what we would now call institutional racism, and responds by trying to assimilate himself totally into New York business society by completely denying his Jewishness. Arthur Miller creates a counterpoint Jewish character, the doctor, who’s so completely well adjusted about his own Jewishness that at the end of the play when they come together it’s a bit of a debate on whether you assimilate or whether you don’t. That was one of the inspirations for our production, which was to allow Shylock to assimilate, or to need or want to assimilate as fully as possible within the Christian world, so that he
would be able to be successful. That seemed to be a truthful way of approaching the play given where we set it. Therefore Shylock inevitably became a modern businessman, and so it all sat very comfortably.

  In the play there is a suggestion that Shylock doesn’t like music, which would be very unlikely for a modern Jewish person, particularly an educated person. That’s another element of Shylock being unsympathetic, because later in the play Lorenzo says, “The man that hath no music in himself, / Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, / Is fit for treasons.” In our production we saw Shylock, when safely in his home, listening to music, and clearly very devout in his culture privately. At home the trappings of his own culture were present, therefore it became even clearer why Shylock, a devout, sensitive, and serious man, would have such difficulty with drunken lager-louts and Christians, and, just like there were in the 1980s, serious money-type city slickers, and why he would not want his daughter to be involved in any of that.

  When Shylock finds out about his daughter having eloped, it’s very clear and it would be very difficult to avoid if you played the complete text, that he is more worried about losing his money than losing his daughter. Therefore we had some judicious pruning which actually addressed that balance and made clear he was more worried the other way around. David Calder played it that the realization that his daughter had left him was the most terrible thing that had happened to him; for example, he ripped his clothes, as Jewish people do when someone is dead. She was effectively dead to him, it was the worst possible kind of betrayal.

  In a post-Holocaust world, one of the things that I think was very powerful and very successful about the production was that it worked almost as an analogy for the state of Israel, and the fact that after the Holocaust one could almost forgive any mistake of Israel. But in the course of doing that, what happens is the oppressed becomes the oppressor. So the bombing of Gaza, for example, isn’t a valid response to the Holocaust. In a similar kind of way it became very clear in our production that Shylock was oppressed. The costume design was absolutely crucial here because he started off by trying to assimilate as much as possible into the Venetian world, but after his daughter was taken away he became more and more orthodox. He went from being a man in a suit and there being no trace of his Jewishness, to, by the end of the play, being dressed almost like an orthodox Jew, and being guilty of very, very cold-hearted savagery. David Calder had a wonderful idea, which was to actually mark out the place, with a felt-tip pen, on Antonio’s heart, where he was going to cut the flesh. By this time this was an act of such cold-hearted revenge that I now think what the production successfully revealed—and I’m not sure I believe it to be true in its intention, but the production made it very clear—was that Shylock, having been oppressed so terribly, gets to breaking point and then becomes a man whose actions have to be stopped. There has to be another way, and that way is the quality of mercy, the quality of forgiveness. I think you get from Portia this wonderful, very passionate plea for mercy in a modern world. The production was very highly rated in Israel, because they felt it was a truthful demonstration of how the oppressed becomes the oppressor.