Books in General
Among voluminous column inches devoted to the Ulster peace process, President Clinton's over-indulgence in what the Italians call 'Turkish practices' or the circumambient billets-doux of the late Princess of Wales, newspaper readers may have noticed certain recent articles devoted to the issue of whether or not Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice is truly so anti- semitic that it should no longer be considered worthy of public performance or inclusion among those Bardic texts studied in school English classes.
The problem is hardly a new one. Some years ago John Gross's Shylock addressed it at length in one of the most enthralling of modern Shakespearean monographs. We shudder in righteous horror at the baiting and ultimate humiliation of Shylock and at the hints of a hateful blood-libel clinging to his insistence on the literal fulfilment of his bond in cutting off a pound of Antonio's 'fair flesh'. Yet we go on crowding to successive productions as we have done for 400 years, since 'the extreame crueltie of Shylocke the Iewe and the obtayninge of Portia by the choyse of three chests' was first acted by the Lord Chamberlain's Servants.
Reasons for The Merchant's immemorial popularity continue to elude me. The play was written during Shakespeare's early maturity, in that same sprightly running which brought us As You Like It, Twelfth Night and Much Ado About Nothing, yet it notably lacks their warmth, buoyancy, breadth of understanding or (in the case of the first two) that special kind of poetic transfiguration the dramatist himself liked to call 'fancy' — the subject, ironically, of the song designed to direct Bassanio in his choice of the leaden casket.
Without Shylock, the main plot's raison d'être, what is left to us? Harley Granville Barker, whose 'Prefaces to Shakespeare' we used to ransack for 'A' Level essays, called The Merchant a fairy tale. If so, it's a grim, juiceless little number. Except in the case of Bassanio's belated offering of himself as a substitute for Antonio on the butcher's block, none of the Venetian goyim engage our sympathy. Gratiano is a garrulous oaf and Lorenzo exists simply to heighten the iniquity of Jessica in betraying her father's trust by robbing him and bartering his engagement ring for a monkey. Bassanio himself, for all his fine protestations, remains an idle chanter, whose fiancée's dutiful surrender to him of her entire estate is enough to make us cry 'Don't do it, sweetheart!' like any pantomime audience.
As for the eponymous merchant, how, beyond a generic status as Shylock's fellow human being, does he deserve the merest dram of that mercy Portia recommends? The embittered closet-queen Antonio has sickened us in earlier acts, not simply through his treatment of Shylock, whom, having piously kicked and spat upon, he now expects to lend him money, but by a vein of querulous self-dramatising peculiar to his kind. The effect of lines such as 'I am a tainted wether of the flock/Meetest for death' or of the toe-curling courtroom farewell to Bassanio is to make us wish that the despised Jew had been swifter in taking his full pound.
Portia is there, of course, to hijack this natural justice with her Vesta Tilley act. Of all the great Shakespearean heroines she is the most exasperating. Goodness, how our hearts bleed at her predicament, the Tamara Beckwith or Mariella Frostrup de ses fours, mega-rich, glamorous, only mildly hamstrung by her potty papa's behests. Feminists may applaud her feistiness in sorting out the lawsuit (with a little help from her barrister cousin), but how can the rest of us love a creature who is never mistaken, never afraid and never, even when disguised, at serious risk? As a match for the divine vulnerability of Rosalind or Beatrice's touching self-realisation, she offers nothing but a few trite cracker- mottoes from bedside Bible-reading, and a fondness for managing other people's lives which is liable to grow more irritating as she reaches middle age.
I've just remembered – I can't pay you.' Modern theatre directors and critics argue that in this tendency of The Merchant's dramatic personae to alienate their audience lies the play's intrinsic strength. If I'm less convinced by this, it's because the dramaturgy itself seems conspicuously un- Shakespearean in its laboriousness, and the impulse towards poetry demonstrated by the various characters so often appears (unlike the quality of mercy) strained to an embarrassing degree. Solanio — oops, sorry, Salerio, though there's little to choose between them — blowing on his soup, the Prince of Morocco challenging colour prejudice, even Lorenzo lecturing Jessica on the power of music, sound as if their speeches were crudely pasted onto the surface of the play rather than springing heartfelt from within its core.
Nowhere are such flaws more nakedly exposed than in Act V, a finale for which scores of unconvincing excuses are routinely offered, Having abandoned his attempt to vitalise Belmont's nocturnal gardens with a little of the moonlit enchantment left over from A Midsummer Night's Dream or with a brief apparition by Lancelot Gobbo, unfunniest and most incompetently handled of all his clowns, Shakespeare settles down to 150 lines of otiose bawdry about women's `rings' and marring the young clerk's pen, before Portia dispenses the cash Christian charity has screwed out of Shylock.
The difficulty is plain. Forced to get rid of the only character who really interested him, an orthodox Jew, respectful alike towards the sanctity of family life and the pure, inviolate letter of the law but ultimately deluded in both, the dramatist wrenches the play's features into a vulgar, inapposite comic grimace. Without Shylock, what is there left to say and who is there to move us? Not smirking goody-goody Portia, smoothiechops Bassanio or Antonio, baffled and self-loathing. We shall go on watching them, because all Shakespeare, even the much despised Pericles and the never acted King John, is supremely watchable, but can some of us be allowed occasionally, in the case of The Merchant of Venice, not to take it for granted that we are looking at anything remotely resembling a masterpiece?
Jonathan Keates
Previous page
