My thoughts on The Merchant of Venice at the ASC

I'm not sure how legal this technically is, but I've decided to post Artistic Director Jim Warren's director's notes for The Merchant of Venice in a separate post. If you're interested in reading the director's notes before reading my personal thoughts, you can read them here.

Now, for my thoughts:

Thinking through The Merchant of Venice has been a process. My contact with Merchant prior to arriving here, as I think I may have said, was primarily literary. I had read the play multiple times, studied it, even written a paper on it--comparing it to Shakespeare's contemporary Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta. But, somehow, regardless of all that contact, I had never been moved by the script. Is that some sort of moral shortcoming on my part? I'm not sure.

I'd rather like to think that it's just another example illustrating the difference between reading a script and seeing a play staged. Because the play moved me. I even know each of the actors in the play on a first name basis, but I was so pulled into the world of the play that, in the trial scene, when Antonio took off the crucifix he was wearing and placed it around Shylock's neck, saying that one of the conditions on which he would spare his life was that Shylock become a Christian, I literally sucked in air as if I'd been hit in the stomach. Then, when Gratiano spit heartlessly on the prayer shawl that had only just been wrapped around Shylock's waist, I felt the prick of tears.

That's not to say that Shylock was portrayed as a saint, because he wasn't. He says and does some pretty nasty things too. As said in the director's notes, they wanted them all to be portrayed as just human--the good, the bad, and the ugly. Because Gratiano was hilarious. Portia was sweet. Everyone praises Antonio to the heavens as a wonderful man, and his letter to Bassanio seems to show him as a selfless, sacrificial human being (though I'm sure that's also been argued). And yet on another side, they all act like bullies and bigots.

The assistant stage manager, Abby, said (and I think I have to agree), you walk out of the play not knowing if you truly like a single one of the characters.

Talking through it with Leanne (the new education intern who now lives next door to me) last night, she said that she did like it, and it was one of the better Merchants she'd seen, but she didn't see that Portia's character had any kind of arc or change. She said she's always thought that the courtroom scene had to change Portia. Because here's a girl who's always had everything she ever wanted, who's lived in an idealistic world of privilege all her life. It's easy for her to say "The quality of mercy is not strained." But what she doesn't understand is that Shylock's world--where he has only ever been shown cruelty and hate and therefore has learned to show only cruelty and hate, a world where his justification for getting revenge is that it is human and that everyone, if wronged, will revenge--is vastly different from hers. So, to be confronted with that and to realize that the world is not the ideal place she thought it was should, theoretically, change her.

She said she also missed some of the gravity of the ring situation. In this production, they make light of it--make it funny. But she said she's always imagined that there is some true disappointment in Portia's realization that her husband just failed his first marital test.

I can see where she's coming from on both counts, but from what I've heard of the rehearsal process of the production, they didn't want to brush the romance under the rug, but neither did they want to highlight it, so perhaps this was the middle ground they settled on. The "button" on the show--tying everything up--was to be a feel-good, funny bit between the husbands and wives after the intensity of the trial scene.

I guess, coming away from the show, the thing I thought most about was Shylock's speech, as always.

Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, heal'd by the same means, warm'd and cool'd by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?

The fact that Shakespeare gives this speech to Shylock is noteworthy. The characters of Gratiano, Solanio, Salarino, and Antonio will never think twice about their bigotry. In the world of the play, they will continue on in it, none the wiser. So is this what Shakespeare was saying? Presumably, to his Elizabethan Christian audience of the day, the play was a comedy. Everything turned out perfectly. The couples all get married and live happily ever after; the Jew's daughter escapes him, runs away with a Christian man, converts to Christianity and takes her father's wealth; the cruel and heartless Jew, who would have murdered a Christian hero, is lawfully stopped, forced to give up the fortune he has left, and forcefully converted to Christianity to save his soul. It is assumed that, to Shakespeare's audience, this would have been an outpouring of Christian mercy and a good day. The bigotry wouldn't have been bigotry at all but normalcy. So is there some sort of subtle comparison between the characters like Gratiano, Solanio, Salarino, Antonio, even Portia, and the members of the audience? The audience members would walk out of the theatre and continue on, none the wiser, unless the play, perhaps, somehow, managed to get people to think without appearing to actually have such an agenda. Could it be possible?

The following piece from the director's notes in the program made me think, however:

"Accepting the notion that racism and bigotry were simply 'how things were back then' is to assume a moral superiority for our modern world and to assume that Shakespeare was ignorant, floundering in an unenlightened age, rather than a playwright capable of creating a textured story with complicated and flawed characters."

Do we, then, generally assume a moral superiority, perhaps not over Shakespeare himself, but over Shakespeare's now nameless, faceless audience members--the general populace of the day? I don't know what it was like to live in England in the late 1500s, much less truly understand the attitudes toward Jews that would have existed then. Jews had been expelled from England in the 1200s and, in the world Shakespeare would have been living in, it's likely that he never even knew a Jewish person. So, as always, I'm speaking entirely in conjecture.

As I stated above, all of the characters seem, in some way, disconcerting. I guess, when it comes down to it, I saw the play for the first time as a very cynical commentary; not sympathetic or, perhaps, entirely fair to any one race, religion, or person, but as potentially mocking all of them.

I'm probably just an uneducated kid, from about as idealistic a world as Portia's, accidentally simplifying very complex and difficult things. But those are my thoughts.