The Merchant of Venice
A friend lend me The Merchant of Venice on DVD - the most recent version of Al Pacino as Shylock and Jeremy Irons as Antonio. Which was interesting to watch, and, as all versions of the play, frustrating at the same time. Because it's impossible to stage or film. After the holocaust, but I wonder about the before as well, because the tradition of a tragic, sympathetic Shylock predates WWII by far - Henry Irving did it in the 19th century (and Shaw had a lot of sarcastic things to say about that), and so did Max Reinhardt in every one of his productions. Which leaves you with the problem of an entire fifth act after the trial in which we're back in romantic comedy territory, Shylock is not as much as mentioned, and the fact you're supposed to rejoice with the rest of the gang. There is also the not so minor problem that Lancelot Gobbo, the film's designated clown, and his jokes just aren't very funny today, and neither is Gratiano. The casket business early on is tiring, and while we're on the subject of not funny jokes, the ones on the suitors' expense aren't, either. (Though Radford cut out Portia's more racist remarks re: Morocco.)
Radford actually managed to pull of the trick of making what he left of the fifth act interesting, by making the relationship between Antonio and Bassanio explicitly homoerotic, which gives Portia an arc of starting out as a bedazzled heiress about to be married for her money (though with sympathy and admiration) and ending as a woman in absolute control of things, including her husband and his (former?) boyfriend, leaving one besotted with and the other beholden to her. So the entire ring business, which can easily get tiresome, is a subtext-ridden powerplay.
However. In the business of Shylock, it seems to me Radford, the director, wants to have his cake and eat it. I listened to some of the commentary, in which he and Lynn Collins reassure each other again and again that Merchant is no antisemitic play, of course not, and wow, listen to these pleas for racial equality and tolerance Shakespeare gives Shylock. And: "Nobody who thought as deep as Shakespeare could have been an antisemite."
(Artists and philosophers who were antisemites, racists, mysogonists, homophobes or otherwise shared horrible prejudices: consider yourself non-existant.)
To which I say: pull the other one, Radford, and brush up on your Elizabethan age as well as your theatre history. Yes, Shylock is a tragic character in a comedy (which is half the problem in the play). Which is in all likelihood because Shakespeare was a genius and took a cliché and invested it with life, dimension and motive. But the cliché was there first. And The Merchant of Venice is written for an audience who jeered and laughed when Elizabeth's Jewish physician, Dr. Lopez, thanks to an intrigue of the Earl of Essex was accused of treason and executed, pleading in vain his innocence. For an audience who just adored Marlowe's Jew of Malta, in which Barrabas, the title character, poisons, schemes and intrigues according to virtually every hateful stereotype which got so many Jews killed in riots throughout the ages.
Now of course that doesn't mean that you have to produce The Merchant of Venice as an antisemitic play today. Art, and it's great art, flaws notwithstanding, is ever adaptable. (Gruesome point: Werner Krauss, one of the most revered and popular German actors of his day - not-German audiences probably saw him at least in Dr. Caligari - played a sympathetic Shylock for Max Reinhardt, an antisemitic vicious Shylock during the Third Reich, and then went back to a tragic Shylock post-war. Krauss, of course, also acted in Jud Süß, and was mightily insulted when that was held against him.) George Tabori, whose mother died at Auschwitz, is obsessed with Merchant and staged it repeatedly. I saw one of the productions, and they're disturbing and effective and make you think.
Michael Radford gives us a prologue in which earnest credit cards inform the audience of how the Jews were treated in Venice. And we see an event alluded to in the play, Antonio spitting on Shylock. (Peter Hall also did this in his stage production more than a decade ago, only there Antonio did it within the bond-signing scene itself.) Frankly, everyone's attitude towards and treatment of Jews comes across clear enough in the play itself, no matter whether you stage it in a way that endorses or rebukes said attitudes, so that I found superfluous. He also could have trusted his actor, because Pacino is great in the part, and conveys all the backstory of Shylock, all the humiliations and the smouldering resentment and then the reaction to the one thing too many, the loss of his daughter, perfectly. I'm especially impressed by the way he handles the "hath not a Jew eyes" scene because that outburst really flows as part of the dialogue and not as A Great Shakespearan Speech And Plea For Tolerance Centuries Before Its Time. Shylock isn't pleading, he's angry and mad as hell, and that's how Pacino plays it. Now he's somewhat famous for his outbursts anyway, but people tend to forget he first became a star as Michael Corleone, a part that asked - and received - subtlety and quietness - and he can still produce that, too - Shylock during his first scene with Bassanio and Antonio is subtle in a way most Shylocks I saw weren't, there is no moustache twirling at all, and his scene with Tubal is quiet agony.
But. Here's where the "wants to have his cake and eat it" part comes in. Because if you want to show Venice as an antisemitic society and go to the trouble of adding a politically correct prologue to point that out, you have to consider the question of Jessica as well. To present the Jessica/Lorenzo romance as anything but adorable fluff, however, would have spoiled what Radford wasn't prepared to give up, the romantic comedy idea of the play. And you can do it. In the Tabori production I've seen, the fact no one at Belmont greets Jessica when she shows up is rather pointed, her "I often heard him say etc." is a desperate attempt to cater favour with the Christians, and one which doesn't work. There is a tv production with Laurence Olivier as Shylock which does the same thing, and the ongoing ostracization of Jessica and her growing doubts and remorse add interesting subtext to a somewhat underwritten part. Now you don't have to do this. You can play it straight and present Jessica as nothing but the comedia dell'arte archetype she also is, the young girl run away with her lover from the old miser's house. But then don't give me a prologue about the situation of the Jews in Venice and don't give me a final scene in which Jessica somehow still has her mother's ring, the one which Tubal tells Shylock earlier in the play - in dialogue kept on screen - Jessica gave away for a monkey.
The scene where cinema and play met best: not surprisingly, the trial scene. Which is probably the reason why we keep coming back to this play again and again despite its uneveness and the problem of staging it after the holocaust. Because that scene, starting with the threatened destruction of one man and ending with the destruction of another, works, still, four hundred years later, fantastically well. You don't care about the historical impossibility of a Jew pressing such a suit against a Christian in such a court at such a time, or nobody recognizing Portia and Nerissa (btw, Radford and the actresses really pulled that off neatly - they did look different enough to make it believable), you just get caught up in the passions presented.
And then you're left with the impossible gulf of history again. Because the ultimate act of destruction against Shylock, the forced conversion, is, indeed, seen as mercy by the characters of the play. We'll never know whether Shakespeare saw it like that, but his contemporaries definitely did. Radford, unable to use inserts in the middle of the film, directs it like that - neither Antonio nor Portia are acting vengeful - but that is faint text against the sight of Shylock, after his breakdown, walking away.
And then you get back to homoerotic love triangles and ring jokes. This really is an impossible play.
Radford actually managed to pull of the trick of making what he left of the fifth act interesting, by making the relationship between Antonio and Bassanio explicitly homoerotic, which gives Portia an arc of starting out as a bedazzled heiress about to be married for her money (though with sympathy and admiration) and ending as a woman in absolute control of things, including her husband and his (former?) boyfriend, leaving one besotted with and the other beholden to her. So the entire ring business, which can easily get tiresome, is a subtext-ridden powerplay.
However. In the business of Shylock, it seems to me Radford, the director, wants to have his cake and eat it. I listened to some of the commentary, in which he and Lynn Collins reassure each other again and again that Merchant is no antisemitic play, of course not, and wow, listen to these pleas for racial equality and tolerance Shakespeare gives Shylock. And: "Nobody who thought as deep as Shakespeare could have been an antisemite."
(Artists and philosophers who were antisemites, racists, mysogonists, homophobes or otherwise shared horrible prejudices: consider yourself non-existant.)
To which I say: pull the other one, Radford, and brush up on your Elizabethan age as well as your theatre history. Yes, Shylock is a tragic character in a comedy (which is half the problem in the play). Which is in all likelihood because Shakespeare was a genius and took a cliché and invested it with life, dimension and motive. But the cliché was there first. And The Merchant of Venice is written for an audience who jeered and laughed when Elizabeth's Jewish physician, Dr. Lopez, thanks to an intrigue of the Earl of Essex was accused of treason and executed, pleading in vain his innocence. For an audience who just adored Marlowe's Jew of Malta, in which Barrabas, the title character, poisons, schemes and intrigues according to virtually every hateful stereotype which got so many Jews killed in riots throughout the ages.
Now of course that doesn't mean that you have to produce The Merchant of Venice as an antisemitic play today. Art, and it's great art, flaws notwithstanding, is ever adaptable. (Gruesome point: Werner Krauss, one of the most revered and popular German actors of his day - not-German audiences probably saw him at least in Dr. Caligari - played a sympathetic Shylock for Max Reinhardt, an antisemitic vicious Shylock during the Third Reich, and then went back to a tragic Shylock post-war. Krauss, of course, also acted in Jud Süß, and was mightily insulted when that was held against him.) George Tabori, whose mother died at Auschwitz, is obsessed with Merchant and staged it repeatedly. I saw one of the productions, and they're disturbing and effective and make you think.
Michael Radford gives us a prologue in which earnest credit cards inform the audience of how the Jews were treated in Venice. And we see an event alluded to in the play, Antonio spitting on Shylock. (Peter Hall also did this in his stage production more than a decade ago, only there Antonio did it within the bond-signing scene itself.) Frankly, everyone's attitude towards and treatment of Jews comes across clear enough in the play itself, no matter whether you stage it in a way that endorses or rebukes said attitudes, so that I found superfluous. He also could have trusted his actor, because Pacino is great in the part, and conveys all the backstory of Shylock, all the humiliations and the smouldering resentment and then the reaction to the one thing too many, the loss of his daughter, perfectly. I'm especially impressed by the way he handles the "hath not a Jew eyes" scene because that outburst really flows as part of the dialogue and not as A Great Shakespearan Speech And Plea For Tolerance Centuries Before Its Time. Shylock isn't pleading, he's angry and mad as hell, and that's how Pacino plays it. Now he's somewhat famous for his outbursts anyway, but people tend to forget he first became a star as Michael Corleone, a part that asked - and received - subtlety and quietness - and he can still produce that, too - Shylock during his first scene with Bassanio and Antonio is subtle in a way most Shylocks I saw weren't, there is no moustache twirling at all, and his scene with Tubal is quiet agony.
But. Here's where the "wants to have his cake and eat it" part comes in. Because if you want to show Venice as an antisemitic society and go to the trouble of adding a politically correct prologue to point that out, you have to consider the question of Jessica as well. To present the Jessica/Lorenzo romance as anything but adorable fluff, however, would have spoiled what Radford wasn't prepared to give up, the romantic comedy idea of the play. And you can do it. In the Tabori production I've seen, the fact no one at Belmont greets Jessica when she shows up is rather pointed, her "I often heard him say etc." is a desperate attempt to cater favour with the Christians, and one which doesn't work. There is a tv production with Laurence Olivier as Shylock which does the same thing, and the ongoing ostracization of Jessica and her growing doubts and remorse add interesting subtext to a somewhat underwritten part. Now you don't have to do this. You can play it straight and present Jessica as nothing but the comedia dell'arte archetype she also is, the young girl run away with her lover from the old miser's house. But then don't give me a prologue about the situation of the Jews in Venice and don't give me a final scene in which Jessica somehow still has her mother's ring, the one which Tubal tells Shylock earlier in the play - in dialogue kept on screen - Jessica gave away for a monkey.
The scene where cinema and play met best: not surprisingly, the trial scene. Which is probably the reason why we keep coming back to this play again and again despite its uneveness and the problem of staging it after the holocaust. Because that scene, starting with the threatened destruction of one man and ending with the destruction of another, works, still, four hundred years later, fantastically well. You don't care about the historical impossibility of a Jew pressing such a suit against a Christian in such a court at such a time, or nobody recognizing Portia and Nerissa (btw, Radford and the actresses really pulled that off neatly - they did look different enough to make it believable), you just get caught up in the passions presented.
And then you're left with the impossible gulf of history again. Because the ultimate act of destruction against Shylock, the forced conversion, is, indeed, seen as mercy by the characters of the play. We'll never know whether Shakespeare saw it like that, but his contemporaries definitely did. Radford, unable to use inserts in the middle of the film, directs it like that - neither Antonio nor Portia are acting vengeful - but that is faint text against the sight of Shylock, after his breakdown, walking away.
And then you get back to homoerotic love triangles and ring jokes. This really is an impossible play.