The Shakespeare Wars

by Ron Rosenbaum

  Again, Berkoff’s achievement as an actor is far more impressive than his intellectual rationale, which seems to me to let Shakespeare off the hook by arguing that since Shakespeare didn’t really know any Jews (most of them had been expelled from England in the thirteenth century—although recently James Shapiro’s research has found more Jews than previously thought living in London), his Shylock is just taking a stock villain stereotype “down from the shelf.” No special animus. Berkoff compares Shakespeare’s Jewish villain to his use of Italian villains, the way they reflect their stereotype, of the scheming “machiavel.”

  But Shakespeare’s Italian villains, however sinister, are more commedia dell’arte stock-villain types, they don’t partake of the deep theological hatred Christian anti-Semitism endowed Jews with, the sick Christ-killing imagery Shakespeare endows his Jew with. And for every Italian Iago, there’s a Romeo.

  Nor was I persuaded that Shakespeare’s Shylock became antisocial because he was excluded from “community” and thus lacked the experience of love and sociability, as Berkoff explains him offstage. I think, in his defense, it can certainly be said Shakespeare wasn’t consumed by anti-Semitism; nothing like this shows up elsewhere in his other plays—but that does not vitiate the ineradicable ugliness of its appearance in The Merchant of Venice.

  But Berkoff’s embodiment of Shylock (as opposed to his exculpatory intellectual rationale) is a powerful piece of truth-telling and an important reproof to the feel-good Shylocks of late.

  Which made the applause even more puzzling. In the version of the Villains piece I saw at the Public Theater, Berkoff’s Shylock was the last bit before the intermission. And after a slight pause to register that it was the intermission, the crowd burst into prolonged applause. Applause, it seemed, for Shylock. Of course, it could be interpreted as applause for Berkoff’s performance in general, and not for his Shylock. But it didn’t leave me feeling like applauding, precisely because it was so truthful. Perhaps the audience had bought into Berkoff’s intellectual rationale—Shylock’s just another colorful Shakespearean villain—but the flesh and blood embodiment was something more profound and disturbing than that. It deserved praise for being truthful, yes, but applause seemed all wrong. As Berkoff said of Olivier’s Othello, “It seemed like you’ve seen a human sacrifice, and you could not clap that.”

  PACINO: THE USURER ON THE ROOF

  But wait. There are those who believe you can “clap that.” There are those, at least, who are capable of clapping themselves on the back for giving us a Merchant of Venice that is an exemplary lesson in tolerance, featuring an utterly unproblematic Shylock.

  I’m speaking of the people who made what is familiarly known as “the Al Pacino Merchant,” the Michael Radford film of Merchant that was released to the accompaniment of torrents of self-congratulation in December 2004.

  If one had to devise a production of Shakespeare’s Merchant that incorporated just about every technique of evasion, every effort to sanitize the anti-Semitism, it would look something like this film.

  It’s an effort worth looking at in detail because already more people have seen, in movie theaters, on VHS and DVD, this version of The Merchant of Venice than (in all likelihood) the total number of people who have seen staged performances in the past century. It is this Merchant that will be likely to be the Merchant for the foreseeable future.

  It asks the question: How much can you sanitize, denature, gentrify Merchant, how much can you subdue Shylock, make Shakespeare’s villain a hardworkin’, loving Jewish father with a bit of a temper, cut the nasty bits, and cleanse (or at least launder) the anti-Semitism that weighs it down like a metaphorical pound of flesh?

  At what point in this process does the play become no longer Shakespeare’s but something other, someone else’s—some bowdlerized, unrecognizable, unthreatening, harmless schoolchild’s tale?

  Not merely a different interpretation but a different play. If you remove the note of the sinister, of the Jewish-identified malevolence unmistakably embedded in Shakespeare’s language, what do you have left? What do you have left anyway that might be called Shakespearean? Again the question of the Merchant comes down to a question of: What do we mean when we say something is Shakespearean or not?

  But I want to preface my thoughts on Michael Radford’s film (it’s more his responsibility than Pacino’s—Radford even gives himself a “screenplay by Michael Radford” credit for his cut-and-paste sanitizing of Shakespeare) by bringing to your attention an exegesis of the words and image of Shylock from an unexpected quarter. It’s an exegesis I’ve not seen referred to in the academic literature and yet one that makes its point with a forceful polemical intelligence, and probably shaped my antithetical response to the Radford Merchant.

  I’m speaking of the remarkably eloquent excursus on the subject of Shylock written by Philip Roth and delivered by one of the characters in Roth’s 1993 novel Operation Shylock.

  I might not have reread Roth’s remarkable passage had I not been asked to give a talk about Merchant at a Fairleigh Dickinson University conference, “Shakespeare and Politics.” The conference took place about ten days before the first screening of the Pacino Merchant as it happened, and in the course of preparation for the talk, I reread the Roth passage and was stunned by its rhetorical power. It was, as well, a remarkable piece of close reading. An impassioned close reading of just three words in Merchant—the first three words Shylock speaks.

  The passage on Shylock takes up only two pages in Roth’s four-hundred-page novel and is delivered by a character named Supposnik, an antiquarian book dealer in Jerusalem and perhaps an Israeli intelligence agent.

  Supposnik’s extraordinary outburst comes out of nowhere—although I suspect Roth’s reading of John Gross’s contemporaneous Shylock might have had something to do with his remarkably erudite railing. And, indeed, it could be seen as the heart of the novel’s meditation on anti-Semitism, on the Jew and Western civilization and the question Shakespeare’s Merchant—its reception and influence—poses to both.

  The speech begins with Supposnik’s reading—his impassioned, hostile close reading of Shylock’s first three words:

  “I studied those three words,” Supposnik begins, the three words “by which the savage, repellant and villainous Jew, deformed by hatred and revenge, entered as our doppelganger into the consciousness of the enlightened West. Three words encompassing all that is hateful in the Jew, three words that have stigmatized the Jew through two Christian millennia and that determine the Jewish fate until this very day, and that only the greatest English writer of them all could have had the prescience to isolate and dramatize as he did. You remember Shylock’s opening line? You remember the three words? What Jew can forget them? ‘Three thousand ducats.’ ”

  He has only begun to get revved up, having named the three words:

  “Five blunt, unbeautiful English syllables and the stage Jew is elevated to its apogee by a genius, catapulted into eternal notoriety by ‘Three thousand ducats.’ ”

  “Elevated to its apogee by a genius.” Here almost in passing is a point that is often neglected in discussion of the play: Merchant is so malevolent precisely because Shakespeare is so good. So good at what he does. When he wanted, for opportunistic theatrical reasons, to raise the stakes in conventional representation of the Jew, to take the latent theological and characterological hostile suspicion of Jews to its most sinister, threatening, crowd-thrilling limits, no one else could have or has bettered him. And he did it not by making him a comic demon as did Marlowe, but rather by knowing the paradoxical effect of giving him a touch of humanity, just enough to make his departure from humanity more repellent.

  You might say that in Supposnik Roth elevates the critique of Shylock and Shakespeare to its apogee by an act of lesser but impressive genius.

  After his exegesis of the “three words,” the relentless Supposnik gives us a bit of the stage history of Shylock and the three thousand ducats: “The English
actor who performed as Shylock for fifty years during the eighteenth century, the Shylock of his day was a Mr. Charles Macklin. We are told that Mr. Macklin would mouth the two ‘th’s’ in ‘three thousand ducats’ with such oiliness that he instantaneously aroused, with just those three words, all of the audiences’ hatred of Shylock’s race. ‘Th-th-th-three thous-s-s-sand ducats-s-s.’ ”

  It’s Berkoff’s creature of spittle!

  “When Mr. Macklin whetted his knife to carve from Antonio’s chest his pound of flesh, people in the pit fell unconscious—and this at the zenith of the Age of Reason. Admirable Macklin! The Victorian conception of Shylock, however—Shylock as a wronged Jew rightfully vengeful—the portrayal that descends through the Keans to Irving and into our century is a vulgar sentimental offense, not only against the genuine abhorrence of the Jew that animated Shakespeare and his era, but to the long illustrious chronicle of European Jew-baiting, the hateful hateable Jew whose artistic roots extended back into the Crucification pageants at York, the Jew whose endurance as the villain of history no less than of drama is unparalleled, the hook-nosed money lender, the miserly money-maddened, egotistical degenerate, the Jew who goes to synagogue to plan the murder of the virtuous Christian—this is Europe’s Jew, the Jew expelled in 1290 by the English, the Jew banished in 1492 by the Spanish, the Jew terrorized by Poles, butchered by Russians, incinerated by Germans, spurned by the British and Americans while the furnaces roared at Treblinka. The vile Victorian varnish that sought to humanize the Jew, to dignify the Jew has never deceived the enlightened European mind about the three thousand ducats, never has and never will.”

  An astonishing rhetorical performance whether you agree entirely with it or not. (I would disagree when he insists on Shakespeare’s “genuine abhorrence of the Jew”: one does not have to have deep-rooted abhorrence to create an abhorrent character if one is a great dramatist whose true passion is not anti-Semitism but theatrical power and the intensification of an audience’s emotional response.)

  But focusing on those three sibilant words intuitively draws our attention to the unmistakable hiss of the serpent in them. Sharpening the point of the spear within Merchant. Whetting the knife.

  It’s an intelligence sadly lacking in the doggedly oblivious Michael Radford production. One that summons up another three words, of Supposnik’s: “vulgar sentimental offense.” Add three other words as well—“vile Victorian varnish”—and you have defined the Michael Radford–Al Pacino Merchant of Venice.

  Actually this production doesn’t merely varnish the serpentine hostility, it burnishes it. In trying so strenuously to distort the play into a civics lesson it exposes what it tries to hide. Nothing anti-Semitic here, it insistently claims. It’s not anti-Semitic, it’s “about anti-Semitism.”

  Here are some of the statements contained in the hysterically defensive promotional material reviewers were handed at the prerelease screenings of Radford’s Merchant of Venice.

  First the producer: “This is a play about Anti-Semitism … and about discrimination and about prejudice but it is not Anti-Semitic. Shylock is a very sympathetic character. We understand his pain, we understand the toll of discrimination he’s faced throughout his life and we understand why he acts in a way that is perceived to be extremely vengeful.”

  Yes, all those Nazi productions of Merchant were designed to promote “understanding” between Jews and Germans, to help the latter “feel the pain” of the former, not to encourage them to inflict pain. Makes sense. Or maybe the Nazis just had a failure of the kind of discerning close reading Michael Radford announced he has attained.

  Radford—who we are told “added moments that he felt the play was lacking”—informs us in the screening notes:

  “It’s so clear that Shakespeare is writing about racism but he’s not racist and the play is not racist. It’s a true statement about culture at a particular time.”

  This is a fascinating point of view. By this reasoning D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, which rationalized Ku Klux Klan lynchings of black people in the post–Civil War era by giving the audience ugly racist caricatures of blacks, is “a true statement about culture at a particular time.” And perhaps with a little fixing up—a pre-credit sequence showing the downside of slave culture, perhaps—the racist film could be presented as being “about racism.”

  Note Radford’s evasive universalizing use of “racism” rather than “anti-Semitism,” the elision of the theological bias—the play’s triumphalist celebration of New Testament mercy over Old Testament Jewish vengefulness. This has nothing to do with “racism” because a Jew could be of any “race” and still suffer from the theological prejudice that was the driving force of Judeaophobia throughout the centuries before “racial anti-Semitism” was invented.

  But Radford went even further in an online interview in which he proclaimed that “his” Merchant wasn’t even about Christians and Jews.

  Instead, he told one interviewer, “The Merchant of Venice I saw as a piece that basically spoke not just of Jews and Venetians. But using the epoch of the 1500s it spoke of a very modern situation—that is two cultures that don’t understand each other in terms of culture and beliefs. I think it’s a film that’s talking about something other than the controversy between the Jews and Christians. It does speak of that, but it’s a text set back then. We hope that people understand what we are saying.”

  Note first how eager he is to make the film not about the whole distasteful Jewish thing, the “controversy between the Jews and Christians” as he calls it. It’s fascinating in itself that he chooses to call the centuries of murderous slaughter, pogroms, persecution, the cruel and degrading ghettoization of Jews by Christian Europe, leading to the Holocaust, as “the controversy between the Jews and Christians” as if it were some sort of long-running debating-society matter. I’m sure Radford is an admirably tolerant gentleman, but look at the knots he must tie himself into to neuter the play.

  But setting that aside, what of the cryptic “We hope that people understand what we are saying”? What’s the secret meant “for those who have ears to hear”?

  Apparently (I’m not the only one to advance this interpretation of the cryptic remark; Jonathan Freedland of The Guardian had the same impression) what Radford’s saying is that the whole Jewish thing is old hat, that the way to make Shakespeare’s play matter today is to see it as an allegory of “two cultures that don’t understand each other.” Which two cultures would that be? For a Briton with a Eurocentric vision, this would seem to be a reference to the lack of “understanding” between the “two cultures” of Muslim immigrants and the Western Europe to which they’ve immigrated, and live, often in impoverished circumstances.

  So no worries about Jews here. This Merchant is really about persecuted Muslims!

  People will do anything, it seems, to find an excuse to avoid the sinister heart of Shakespeare’s play. It’s hard to say which is sillier, this making Merchant Judenrein, so to speak, a universal fable of persecution, or the resultant incoherent production. Incoherent because Radford has to hack away pounds of flesh from the play, so to speak, to make his film the bloodless, weightless falsification it is.

  “He made the right cuts,” the producer averred. In addition to the obvious ones—“I hate him because he is a Christian”—he edits and invents at will. At Will’s expense, one might say.

  Consider how Radford “fixed” just one speech. It’s not one of the most renowned speeches in the play but in certain ways it’s one of the most definitive. It speaks to the argument that Shakespeare did not portray Shylock in an anti-Semitic light, in terms of age-old specifically Jewish stereotypes, but rather as someone “wronged and justly vengeful” because Antonio’s friends had stolen his daughter from him.

  Most will recall Solanio, one of the Christian cronies, depicting Shylock running through the streets of Venice, lamenting the loss of his daughter, Jessica, and the money she’d absconded with when she eloped with a Christi
an, Lorenzo.

  As Solanio reports on Shylock:

  I never heard a passion so confus’d,

  So strange, outrageous, and so variable

  As the dog Jew did utter in the streets.

  “My daughter! O my ducats! O my daughter!

  That’s all we hear in the film: Radford has cut the last seven lines of Shylock’s words as quoted by Bassanio. The lines that go:

  Fled with a Christian! O my Christian ducats!

  Justice! the law! my ducats, and my daughter!

  A sealed bag, two sealed bags of ducats,

  Of double ducats, stol’n from me by my daughter!

  And jewels, two stones, two rich and precious stones,

  Stol’n by my daughter! Justice! find the girl,

  She hath the stones upon her, and the ducats.”

  The cut eliminates precisely the greedy excessiveness of Shylock, his inability to separate or even consider the loss of his daughter as much as he feels the loss of his money. In the initial lines Radford uses they are given roughly equal weight. No prize for paternal love here; nonetheless the lines that are cut give us the full measure of the inhumanity Shylock is endowed with by Shakespeare’s language.

  In the cut lines we see the transition from Shylock’s initially divided sense of loss—daughter and ducats—his normal human feeling as father, subverted by his lust for lucre and become something far worse as it mutates into a kind of inhuman, even demonic obsession with his ducats alone. In the latter seven lines he doesn’t want his daughter back, he wants his daughter locked up.

  Not just locked up but dead: Radford cuts lines from Shylock’s subsequent speech in which he wishes his daughter were dead and “the ducats in her coffin.”

  Cutting this makes for a nicer, or less repellent, Shylock, but Shakespeare clearly wasn’t attempting to give us a more gentle portrait of Shylock with those lines that were cut. He was whetting the knife, so to speak, making the hatefulness of Shylock cut deeper, and Radford’s edit dulls that knife, whatever we may think of it.