“Were you consciously replicating Garrick’s gesture?” I asked Berkoff.
“Oh yes,” he said. “One critic, I forget who it was, said that when Garrick saw the Ghost, he did more than make the whole audience think there was a ghost there. The temperature of the theater went down. The critic actually felt it getting cold. He did something. It started very, very slow, and then he sees it, and then he goes—from the slowness and people getting used to slowness …”
We were in the bright-lit dining room of the Gramercy Park Hotel as Berkoff began to act out the Garrick-seeing-the-Ghost gesture. It’s late morning, the place is empty except for a waiter rattling a tray of coffee cups. Nothing could be further from the chill, midnight parapets of Elsinore. And yet … Berkoff begins the gesture just as slowly as he says. He turns in his seat toward me, glances up to his left, and suddenly without warning, like some swift Bruce Lee kata, one hand shoots up, fending off the supernatural, the other shielding his eyes from the terror.
I must admit it snuck up and chilled me, that gesture: a representation of terror that was itself terrifying. All the more impressive because Berkoff did not avail himself of any of Garrick’s ingenious artifices to achieve his effect: Garrick, for instance, was said to have engaged a skilled wigmaker who designed hair that would stand on end when Garrick saw the Ghost.
There was, however, one gesture (shall we say) from Berkoff’s own production of Hamlet that he didn’t reproduce in his one-man “Villains” show: the gesture that led Oxford Shakespeare coeditor Gary Taylor (who thought Berkoff’s Hamlet the best he’d ever seen) to recall that Berkoff’s Hamlet “fucks Gertrude.” Of course, ever since Olivier’s film version it is not novel to play up the Oedipal tension between Hamlet and his mother, particularly in the so-called closet scene in Gertrude’s chamber, when Hamlet confronts her with her sexual guilt for betraying his father (lust linked to a radiant angel prays on garbage). But to “fuck Gertrude”—was it an effort to top Olivier, so to speak?
Berkoff had been talking about that scene when I raised the subject, because it’s the scene in which Hamlet kills Polonius—evidence, Berkoff believes, of the prince’s villainy.
“Hamlet,” Berkoff was saying, “is corrupted by the very things we have to do, as many people are. The man starts out as a revolutionary or radical. In the end, he becomes a kind of dictator because he becomes contaminated by the very weapons, the very methods, of his enemy. So I mean, Hamlet causes—has caused—more deaths than practically anyone else in the whole of Shakespeare. But because he’s charming from time to time, people forget that. And he drives Ophelia into suicide. And everybody thinks it’s a charming scene of, you know, young man’s passionate rage against a woman who has kind of collaborated with her father out of a weakness. Well, I mean, he drives her to suicide, and after the killing of Polonius, he doesn’t react very much. He makes jokes about it. And when Rosencrantz and Guildenstern go to their deaths, he says, ‘Why, man, they did make love to this employment.’ ”
With this cue (“make love”) I mentioned what Gary Taylor had told me and asked him, “Did you ‘fuck Gertrude’?”
“No, not at all,” he says.
It turns out to be a “depends on what you mean by ‘fuck’ ” answer.
“It looked as if I was,” he says, “because it’s a very dramatic scene and I do have Gertrude on the floor. We had no bed in our production. And as I’m telling her, you know, ‘Refrain, et cetera, et cetera,’ refrain from having sex with Claudius, your husband’s murderer and usurper, I’m on top of her by that time, not kind of crotch to crotch, but just on my knees holding her down. And I say, ‘It shall go hard,/But I will delve one yard below their mines,/And blow them at the moon,’ and it was almost orgasmic when I say this to her … I tried to make the words fit and I pressed myself right into her crotch. I didn’t fuck her, of course, but I pressed myself right into her crotch and had an orgasm. It’s quite disgusting.” He laughs. “Because I got up and loosened my trouser where the sperm flowed down the leg.”
Where the sperm flowed …? I think (I hope) he means “as if it flowed.”
“So you did [fuck Gertrude], right? Well, you came.”
“Yes, well, a little frottage,” he says. “I was using her body as a kind of metaphor, to point [punctuate] the lines.” It was violent, he says. “It was sex and murder.”
Berkoff has an interesting theory that sex or talk of sex in Shakespeare is almost inevitably followed by violence, even murder. He believes that “in Shakespeare’s warped mind” there is some unhealthy connection between the two. (It’s not too dissimilar to Peter Hall’s belief that at one point at least “Shakespeare hated sex.”)
“Shakespeare’s warped mind”: I think it’s valuable and important that Berkoff is capable of an unsparing critique of Shakespeare, a refreshing departure from the kind of bardolatry that insists on seeing Shakespeare exempt from all mortal and moral flaw.
Which brings us to Berkoff’s Shylock.
WHICH SHYLOCK?
It’s the most truthful and the most terrible moment in his “Villains” piece. It’s the most truthful and the most terrible Shylock I’ve seen. Truthful, in part, because it’s a throwback to the original, a throwback to the deeply repellent character Shakespeare created. A throwback that has no truck with contemporary cant of the sort that attempts to exculpate Shakespeare and Shylock, evade or explain away the anti-Semitism. It doesn’t fall victim to the intellectual fallacy, the comforting but deluded evasion that has pervaded many recent productions of The Merchant of Venice: the belief that if you make Shylock a nicer guy, play him with more dignity, play up the cruelty of the Christians as well, you can somehow transcend the ineradicable anti-Semitism of the caricature.
The problem with the warm and fuzzy Shylock, the feel-good Shylock, you might say, is that it doesn’t diminish, it actually exacerbates, deepens the anti-Semitism of the play as a whole. The more “nice” you make the moneylender, the more you end up making the play not about the villainy of one Jew, but the villainy of all Jews, a deep-seated villainy that subsists beneath the surface even in those who appear “nice” on the surface. The more warm and fuzzy you make Shylock, the more you make it a play about the fact that even such a Jew will not hesitate, when it comes down to it, to take a knife and cut the heart out of a Christian.
And so I have seen Shylock played as a kind of lovable schlemiel by Dustin Hoffman (in a production directed by Peter Hall), and I have seen Shylock performed by the great English actor Henry Goodman (in a production directed by Trevor Nunn) as a tweedy academic type. And I’ve watched Olivier play him on film as a distinguished-looking Edwardian banker type, and in each case no matter how dignified and complex a Jew he’s costumed as, ultimately he’s forced by the text to remove the mask and reveal the bloodthirsty Jew of anti-Semitic imagery beneath the dignified garb. Beneath even the most civilized, gentlemanly, gentrified Jew is—if the production has any fidelity to the text—a vengeful, heartless creature prepared to cut out the heart (or more precisely a pound of flesh “nearest” the heart) of a Christian with a knife.
The intention of all these recent feel-good Shylocks is to remove the sting of anti-Semitism, but to my mind they succeed inadvertently in driving the sting deeper. The Trevor Nunn production can’t resist, in the scene where Shylock unsheathes his knife, having Antonio assume the pose of a bare-chested and bound Jesus about to be pierced by the cruel nails of his crucifiers, thus making apparent and visible the Christ-killing imagery in the language of The Merchant, and making inescapable the implication: within every Jew, however smooth the surface, lurks a Christ-killer.
For some reason some of the most extreme attempts to exculpate Shakespeare and Shylock have come from Jews. One of the most brilliant of the younger generation of Shakespearean scholars, Kenneth Gross, shocked me when he told me he was working up a theory that Shakespeare was Shylock, both literally—that Shakespeare was a Jew or had Jewish blood—and figuratively: that Sh
ylock was Shakespeare’s self-portrait. In his otherwise valuable study Shakespeare and the Jews, James Shapiro “explains” Shylock by revealing that the “pound of flesh” Shylock wants to cut out of Antonio is really a “displaced” castration fantasy, the “flesh” in question lying below the belt. So it is some Freudian complex that is implicitly at fault, not the embedded anti-Semitism. That sounds like a displacement to me. And we’ve seen how Stephen Greenblatt would have us believe a conjecture based on an unfounded supposition that Shakespeare witnessed the execution of a Jew—and that when he heard the crowd laugh at the hanging, he blamed Marlowe’s Jew of Malta for their heartlessness and made up his mind to give us a more “humanized” Jew.
And then there is the mad obsession of Arnold Wesker, the British Jewish playwright. I saw him read aloud from a play that was an attempt to rewrite Shakespeare: Wesker’s The Merchant. I’ve read the play and I’ve read Wesker’s diary in book form of his quarter-century-long effort to get it properly produced: The Birth of “Shylock” and the Death of Zero Mostel, one of the great quixotic sagas of Shakespearean—and Jewish—folly, I believe. Worth recounting as a prime instance of what one might call contemporary “Shylock denial”—the fear of facing Shakespeare’s original Jew.
For those unfamiliar with Wesker, he leapt to fame as one of the Angry Young Men generation of British playwrights, along with John Osborne and Joe Orton. While not as famous as Look Back in Anger, Wesker’s plays, which include The Kitchen and Chips with Everything, gave him a substantial reputation in Europe and in his diary/book he’s always jetting off to Denmark or Sweden for some new state-theater production of some work rarely produced in English anymore.
But back in 1975 when he could still command the elite talent of the theater, he developed an ambition to rewrite Shakespeare, specifically to rewrite Shylock, to make him not a nicer moneylender, but not a moneylender at all. He made his Shylock a bibliophile, a rare-book collector, not someone the patrician Antonio spat upon, but someone Antonio shared fine wines and true friendship with.
Wesker at least has no illusions about Shakespeare’s Shylock. As an epigraph to his Birth of “Shylock” and the Death of Zero Mostel he quotes from the British critic John Gross (who writes for The New York Review of Books as well). Gross is the author of Shylock: A Legend and Its Legacy, perhaps the definitive treatment of the question. Wesker’s epigraph from Gross reads thus:
“Shylock is meant to be a villain. There can be arguments about his motives and his personality, but there can be no serious argument about his behavior. Given the opportunity—an opportunity which he himself has created—he attempts to commit legalized murder.
“He is also a Jewish villain. He did not have to be: Christians were moneylenders too, and the story would have worked perfectly well with a Christian villain. […] He belongs inescapably to the history of anti-Semitism. […] at no point does anyone (any other character) suggest that there might be a distinction to be drawn between his being a Jew and his being an obnoxious individual. The result is ugly … the ground for the Holocaust was well prepared.…”*
But what about Shylock’s famous speech in his defense: “Hath not a Jew eyes?… If you prick us, do we not bleed?” one is inevitably asked. Some might argue that this indicated that Shakespeare had a more advanced consciousness than the medieval anti-Semitism that persisted into his time. Perhaps. But if the speech is read to the bitter end “do we not bleed” bleeds any poignancy dry as it turns out to be a rationale for vengefulness: If we are alike in these respects, “If you wrong us shall we [just as you] not revenge?” as well.
And even if it were true that the speech indicates Shakespeare’s consciousness was “ahead of its time” it does not seem to have diminished the effect of the play, the way it drew deep from and gravely exacerbated anti-Semitic stereotypes: even with “good Jews,” prick them and they bleed, but scratch the surface and they’re vengeful butchers.
Shylock’s speech of self-defense may tell us something about Shakespeare’s consciousness but it doesn’t, it hasn’t, defused the historical effects of the play. Hitler and Goebbels were not somehow deluded when the Nazis sponsored no less than fifty productions of the play during the Third Reich. They knew the effect if not the intent of the play. In a persuasive essay on the origins of English anti-Semitism the British author and barrister Anthony Julius argued that, unlike most European nations where theological and racial anti-Semitism had the most malign influence, in Britain it was literary anti-Semitism that was more influential. Two literary characters in particular: Shakespeare’s Shylock and his reembodiment in Dickens’s Fagin.
Wesker’s solution, his way of remedying the harm that Shylock has done, is to rewrite Shylock entirely, to make him into a perfect and perfectly lovable English gentleman, to make him (although Wesker wouldn’t say it this way) into a “respectable gentile.” To make him not a moneylender but a bibliophile, a bon vivant, a connoisseur-like companion to Antonio. Not someone whom Antonio would “void his rheum” on—spit upon in public. Rather someone Antonio would invite into his room.
Wesker tells us he had this insight back in 1975 after seeing Laurence Olivier play Shylock as what Wesker characterized as an “oi-yoi-yoi” Jew. Here Wesker gives away the game: it sounds as if he’s ashamed of Shylock for his lack of gentility. He’s unconsciously internalized the values of English gentility and thinks somehow it helps matters to give us a gentile-friendly Jew. An aristo-Jew. In any case an essentially gentrified Shylock was born in Wesker’s mind during that Olivier performance.
“Then came the moment,” Wesker tells us, “when Portia announced Shylock couldn’t have his pound of flesh because it would involve spilling blood, which wasn’t in the contract, and I was struck with what I felt to be an insight: the real Shylock would not have torn his hair and raged for being denied his gruesome prize, but would have said, ‘Thank God! Thank God to be relieved of the burden of taking a life.’ ”
“The real Shylock”! As if there were some historical Jew Shakespeare misrepresented. Twenty years of suffering and madness followed Wesker’s “insight,” this insight that depended on a ridiculous category error (as the logicians would call it): “the real Shylock” wouldn’t have behaved badly, because “real” Jews are nice! Well, sure they are, many of them, but there was no “real Shylock,” there is only Shakespeare’s Shylock. A different Shylock wouldn’t be Shylock, and it doesn’t help erase the legacy or the reality of Shakespeare’s original Shylock to confect a saccharine Shylock.
But Wesker felt that by rewriting The Merchant of Venice so that the civilized bibliophile and student of history and culture, his Shylock, would be Antonio’s friend, he would somehow remedy the anti-Semitism of Shakespeare’s play.
But in an epic act of self-deception he didn’t realize that this left him without a coherent play, or with a play that was even more anti-Semitic in effect if not intent. Wesker was for some reason intent on changing the character of Shylock but preserving the ugly heart of the plot: the moment when Shylock would seek to cut the heart out of Antonio, conceived now not as a Christian who spat on him, but as his best friend. Which makes things, makes Shylock, far worse!
Wesker’s play, originally called The Merchant, later retitled Shylock, then was the ultimate reductio ad absurdum of all modern attempts to gentrify Shylock: the nicer you make Shylock, the more you endow him with “gentility” in every sense of the word, the uglier you make the Jew within when the moment comes to draw the knife. I wish intelligent directors, actors and academics would stop trying to defend Shylock—and Shakespeare—in this incredibly naïve way. This is true bardolatry of the worst kind: Shakespeare can do no wrong, cannot be guilty of an attitude his entire culture shared, must be absolved and shown to be a Higher Being in all respects—by making Shylock nice. Please.
And yet Wesker’s reputation back in ’75 was enough to enable him to enlist in this project none other than Zero Mostel to play this new improved Shylock on Broadway. Zero
Mostel of The Producers; Zero Mostel of Fiddler on the Roof. One might have wanted to see Zero Mostel wrestle with the real Shylock, Shakespeare’s Shylock. But alas the contradictions of Wesker’s play may have been too much for Mostel. There was a lot of strife in rehearsal and Mostel died after the very first performance of the Wesker Shylock’s out-of-town tryouts in Philadelphia, and the play died shortly thereafter on Broadway. One doesn’t blame Wesker for Mostel’s death, but the strain of attempting to make coherent the absurd, incoherent role couldn’t have helped. But Wesker still doesn’t get it. He thinks flaws in the production (not the script) and the loss of Mostel were responsible for the play’s failure.
What followed was a twenty-year ordeal in which Wesker attempted to get the play produced in English. I felt for Wesker’s desperation; Shylock had driven him mad in a way, but everything he did to the Shylock story seemed to confirm John Gross’s judgment of the ineradicable, irredeemable anti-Semitism of the play. It was as if Wesker had been both possessed and cursed by Shylock. And at one point in the midst of an argument with his close friend, and the director of the play, John Dexter, Wesker tells us in his disarmingly honest if confused book that, to his horror, he’d become Shylockized, one might say. He finds himself telling Dexter that if he (Wesker) were Shylock and Dexter were Antonio, yes he would draw a knife and use it on Dexter to enforce a Shylockian bond. It becomes a horror story almost, Wesker possessed by the malign spirit of the “real Shylock,” the “original Shylock,” while trying to make a “nice” Shylock.
Sorry, it’s just not a character you can make nice about, or rationalize as some do, by emphasizing the play’s critique of the cruel mockery of the money-hungry Christians as well. Christians weren’t slaughtered for their religious stereotypes in Europe; Jews were. None of the Christian characters played the ugly and vicious role Shylock did in Nazi propaganda. When one encounters this allegedly sophisticated Shakespeare-made-the-Christians-worse evasion, one has to ask why the Nazis put on fifty productions of Merchant. Because of its critique of the Christians?
The Shakespeare Wars Page 38
